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To mark the 20th anniversary of the Lockerbie air disaster, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewalis republishing these important articles. Since their first publication, important new evidence has cast even more doubt on the unjust conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi -- see comments section below.

February 14, 2001 -- The eminent barrister Horace Rumpole
has often noted that the “golden thread running through the history of
British justice” is that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty by
the prosecution “beyond a reasonable doubt”. Of course, Rumpole is a
fictional character created by writer John Mortimer. As the verdict
handed down in the Lockerbie bombing trial proves, the “golden thread”
is just as fictional.

On January 31, 2001, the three
Scottish lords sitting in judgement on the charges against two Libyans
accused of planting the bomb that felled Pan Am flight 103 over
Scotland on December 21, 1988, found Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi
guilty of the murders of the 270 people killed in the disaster. Al Amin
Khalifa Fhimah was found not guilty.

Lockerbie anniversary plea

In
the week leading up to the 20th Anniversary of Lockerbie, Dr Jim Swire, relative of a Lockerbie victim,
speaks about his belief in the innocence of convicted Al Megrahi. The
Libyan was convicted of the atrocity after a trial in 2001 at Camp
Zeist in the Netherlands.

* * *

The nine-month trial was held in the Netherlands and
conducted according to Scottish law. It was the result of an agreement
between Libya and the US and British governments that finally allowed
the trial — which had been stalled for almost five years by London's
and Washington's insistence that the case be held in either the United
States or Britain — to be heard in a “neutral” third country.

In their 82-page judgement, the three judges found that,
despite “uncertainties and qualifications”, “there is nothing in the
evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt of
the first accused [Megrahi]”.

According to the judges, the evidence showed that Megrahi,
Libyan Arab Airlines' security chief at Malta's Luqa airport, had
purchased items of clothing from a shop in Malta that were of the same
brand and type as those that forensics experts had determined were in
the Samsonite suitcase that contained the bomb that destroyed Pan Am
103. From the presence of these brands and types of clothes in the
suitcase, the judges inferred that Megrahi had somehow succeeded in
having the “item of baggage”, unaccompanied by a passenger, transferred
from Malta, via Frankfurt, to London's Heathrow airport, where it was
loaded onto the doomed aircraft.

The judges added that with “other background circumstances”
— such as Megrahi's previous (and seemingly continuing) service with
Libya's security organisation (JSO), his “association” with the Swiss
company that manufactured a type of timer which the prosecution claimed
was attached to the bomb and “his movements [between Malta and Libya]
under a false name at or around the material time” — “a real and
convincing pattern” formed.

Unexpected

Ian Bell wrote in the Scottish Sunday Herald
on February 4, “Last week you would have been hard-pressed to find an
Edinburgh lawyer willing to bet on any guilty verdict being reached at
Camp Zeist. The same belief was evident, it is reported, in Whitehall.”

Robert Black QC, the highly respected professor of Scottish
law at Edinburgh University who in 1994 first suggested the plan for a
third country trial, told the BBC on February 4: “This was a very, very
weak circumstantial case. I am absolutely astounded, astonished. I was
extremely reluctant to believe that any Scottish judge would convict
anyone, even a Libyan, on the basis of such evidence.”

Michael Scharf, a law professor at the New England School of Law, agreed, telling the February 2 New York Times:
“It sure does look like they bent over backwards to find a way to
convict, and you have to assume the political context of the case
influenced them.”

Even some of the British relatives of the Lockerbie victims
were sceptical: “All we know from this trial is that one of the two was
innocent. I think we should be grateful... But we have our doubts about
the guilt of Megrahi”, Martin Cadman, whose son was killed in the
disaster, told the February 2 London Independent.

Beyond reasonable doubt?

The
prosecution case, and the judges' verdict, rested fundamentally on two
points: it was Megrahi who purchased the clothes which were packed into
the suitcase that contained the bomb, and that suitcase began its
fateful journey in Malta rather than either Frankfurt airport or at
Heathrow.

Yet, Megrahi was never positively identified as the man who
purchased the clothing, the prosecution did not provide any physical or
documentary evidence to link Megrahi to the suitcase or the bomb
components, and no evidence was offered to prove that the suitcase
began its journey in Malta, let alone that it was Megrahi who sent it
on its way.

The guilty verdict hinged most on the testimony of Tony
Gauci, the owner of the clothes shop in Malta. In their judgement, the
judges stated: “We are nevertheless satisfied that his identification
so far as it went of the first accused as the purchaser was reliable
and should be treated as a highly important element in this case.”

In their verdict, the judges described the torturous path
Gauci's “identification” of Megrahi had taken. The shopkeeper was first
interviewed by police on September 1, 1989, and described the purchaser
as being “six feet or more” in height and well-built. On September 13,
he told police the man was about 50 years old.

Megrahi is five feet, eight inches tall, of medium-build and was 36-years-old in December 1988.

On
September 14, 1989, Gauci was shown 19 photos and identified a man as
being “similar” to the purchaser but added that the purchaser was 20
years older. The man's photo — who was not Megrahi — was included
because police thought he resembled an artist's impression and an
identikit portrait based on Gauci's description.

On September 26, 1989, Gauci viewed more photos and pointed
out another man included at the suggestion of German police. On August
31, 1990, Gauci was shown 24 photos and pointed out a man who, he said,
had a face with a similar shape and style of hair to the purchaser. It
was not Megrahi.

On December 6, 1989, and again on September 10, 1990, Gauci
was shown photos but did not identify anybody. Included both times were
photos of Abo Talb, a Palestinian jailed in Sweden in 1989 for
terrorist bombings. Yet, Gauci told the court that in late 1989 or
early 1990 his brother had shown him a newspaper article about the
Lockerbie disaster which included a photo of a man with the word
“bomber” printed across it. Gauci said he thought it was the man that
bought the articles from him or that it resembled the person who bought
the clothes from him. The man was Abo Talb.

On February 15, 1991, police showed Gauci 12 photos. Gauci
told police that all the men in the photos were younger than the
purchaser. The police pressed Gauci to “allow for any age difference”
and look again. He pointed to a photo and said the man “resembles the
man who bought the clothing ... of all the photographs I have been
shown, this photograph 8 is the only one really similar to the man who
bought the clothing, if he is a bit older, other than the one my
brother showed me [of Abo Talb].” Photograph 8 was Megrahi's 1986
passport photo.

Towards the end of 1998 or the beginning of 1999, Gauci
approached police after he was shown a magazine article about the
Lockerbie disaster which named Megrahi as a suspect. He told police
that the photo of Megrahi in the article “looks like the man” he sold
clothes to.

On August 13, Gauci picked out Megrahi from an
identification parade with the words: “Not exactly the man I saw in the
shop. Ten years ago I saw him, but the man who look a little bit like
exactly [sic] is number 5”. At the trial, Gauci pointed to Megrahi and said he “resembles him a lot”.

The
defence lawyers protested that Gauci's eventual, less than positive
identification of Megrahi had taken place after the defendant's photo
had been in the world news for years.

In their verdict, the judges admitted that Gauci “never made
what could be described as an absolutely positive identification”. The
judges defended their assessment of Gauci's “identification” with the
incredible statement that, “There are situations where a careful
witness who will not commit himself beyond saying that there is a close
resemblance can be regarded as more reliable and convincing in his
identification than a witness who maintains that his identification is
100% certain.”

Gauci was also unclear as to when the items were purchased.
On the witness stand, he agreed the date was either November 23 or
December 7, 1988. The prosecution insisted it was December 7 and in the
verdict, the judges did too.

However, in his statements to police and in his testimony at
the trial Gauci said that it had been, or was, raining when the
purchaser entered the shop. The nearby Luqa airport's chief
meteorologist testified that it did not rain on December 7, but did so
on November 23.

Interestingly, before the indictment of the two Libyans, the
press reported that the police had stated that the clothing had been
purchased on November 23.

Why is this important? First, because Megrahi was in Malta
on December 7 but investigators could find no evidence that he was
there on November 23, and second, because Abo Talb, who Gauci first
identified as the purchaser, might have been. Talb had visited Malta
from Sweden in late October 1988. When he left on October 26, he flew
to Sweden on a return ticket valid for one month, raising the
possibility could have returned.

Talb, who testified at the Lockerbie trial, could only prove
he was in Sweden until November 10 and most of December, including on
December 7. Talb presented no evidence to prove he was in Sweden after
November 10 and before December 5. It is therefore possible that Talb
entered Gauci's shop on November 23.

In December 1989, it was reported in several major
newspapers that Scottish police, in papers filed with the Swedish legal
authorities, had named Talb as the suspect “in the murder or
participation in the murder of 270 people”.

The judges, however, chose to declare that “there is some
support for Abo Talb when he said that he remained in Sweden and did
not return to Malta after 26 October 1988”.

PFLP-GC

Talb's possible involvement is in line
with the defence team's argument that there was a more plausible — and
simpler — theory of how the bomb-laden suitcase reached Heathrow than
the prosecution's convoluted speculations.

Talb was a member of the Syria-based Palestinian Popular
Struggle Front, which worked closely with another Syria-backed
terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC). On October 26, 1988 — less than a
month before the Lockerbie disaster — West German police raided PFLP-GC
safe-houses and seized Toshiba radio cassette players, explosives,
detonators, timers, barometric pressure devices, as well as Pan Am
timetables and unused airline baggage tags.

The cache suggested a plot to bomb an aircraft. A trade mark
of the PFLP-GC's bombs at the time were that they were concealed within
Toshiba radio cassette players. The bomb that brought down Pan Am 103
had been concealed in a Toshiba player, although a different model from
that generally used by the PFLP-GC. That not all the PFLP-GC's stock of
bombs had been discovered was proven when, in April 1989, three
explosive devices were seized in a raid.

At first, US and British investigators also were convinced
that the PFLP-GC — with the backing of the Syrian and Iranian
governments — was the prime suspect in the Lockerbie disaster.

The FBI in April 1989 leaked news that the PFLP-GC had smuggled the bomb onto flight in Frankfurt. The Washington Post
on May 11, 1989, reported that the US State Department had stated that
the CIA was “confident” that the PFLP-GC had carried out the attack on
behalf of the Iranian government. The attack was said to be in
retaliation for the 290 pilgrims massacred while returning from Mecca
when a US warship blew a Iranian passenger jet out of the sky as it
passed over the Persian Gulf.

On December 16, 1989, the New York Times reported that Scottish investigators had announced that they had “hard evidence” that the PFLP-GC was behind the bombing.

In
October 1990, US and British authorities suddenly did a backflip as the
US build-up in the Gulf was gathering pace following Iraq's invasion of
Kuwait. Investigators attention suddenly shifted from the Syria-backed
PFLP-GC to Libya. In 1991, the two Libyans were formally indicted.

What changed between 1988 and 1991? Syrian dictator Hafiz
Assad was an enthusiastic participant in the 1991 Gulf War against
Iraq, whereas Libya's leader Moammer Qadhafi opposed the war and
campaigned for a peaceful settlement.

The judges rejected this alternative theory, although they
did “accept that there is a great deal of suspicion as to the actings
of Abo Talb and his circle, but there is no evidence to indicate that
they had either the means or the intention to destroy a civil aircraft
in December 1988”.

This contention is based on the claim that the Lockerbie
bomb was triggered by a Swiss-made timer of a type (MST-13) that had
been supplied to the Libyan army in the mid-1980s. Yet the owner of the
company that made the devices testified that MST-13s had also been
supplied to the East German Stasi spy agency. East Germany is known to
have harboured the PFLP-GC.

Despite the judges' proviso that “we are unable to exclude
the possibility that any MST-13 timers in the hands of the Stasi left
their possession, although there is no positive evidence that they did
and in particular that they were supplied to the PFLP-GC”, their
verdict stated that “the evidence relating to [the terrorist activities
of the PFLP-GC] does not create a reasonable doubt in our minds about
the Libyan origin of this crime”.

`Major difficulty for Crown'

The judges' verdict
doggedly insisted that “we are satisfied that it has been proved that
the primary suitcase containing the explosive devise was dispatched
from Malta, passed through Frankfurt and was loaded onto PA103 at
Heathrow”.

Yet, the judges contradict themselves by admitting that
there were no records that showed any unaccompanied baggage was carried
on the flight to Frankfurt and that all luggage in Malta was checked by
military personnel for the presence of explosives. The judges noted
that the Luqa airport had a “relatively elaborate security system” and
security procedures that “seem to make it extremely difficult for an
unaccompanied and unidentified bag to be shipped on a flight out”.

The judges conceded that: “If therefore the unaccompanied
bag was launched from Luqa, the method by which that was done is not
established, and the Crown accepted that they could not point to any
specific route by which the primary suitcase could have been loaded...
The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary
suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 [the Malta to Frankfurt
flight] is a major difficulty for the Crown case.”

The judges' determination to deny that the bomb could have
been introduced at a point other than Malta, and by a culprit other
than Megrahi, led them to ignore that the security at Frankfurt airport
was notoriously lax — something the US law enforcement authorities knew
about at the time.

According to an October 30, 1990, US NBC television news
report, “Pan Am flights from Frankfurt, including 103, had been used a
number times by the [US Drug Enforcement Agency] as part of its
undercover operation to fly informants and suitcases of heroin into
Detroit as part of a sting operation to catch dealers in Detroit...
Informants would put suitcases of heroin on the Pan Am flights
apparently without the usual security checks ... through an arrangement
between the DEA and the German authorities.”

The report stated that the DEA was investigating the
possibility that a young man who lived in the US and regularly visited
the Middle East may have unwittingly carried the bomb aboard flight
103.

An investigation commissioned by Pan Am's insurance company
in 1989 also concluded that the most likely source of the bomb was that
the PFLP-GC had infiltrated the DEA's protected drug smuggling
operation and succeeded in having the bag containing the bomb placed on
Pan Am 103 in Frankfurt.

Megrahi should have been found not guilty because the
prosecution did not prove him guilty beyond “reasonable doubt”. A
terrible miscarriage of justice has taken place because the three loyal
servants of the British imperialist ruling class who sat in judgement
on the fate Megrahi and Fhimah had already decided to find one of them
guilty regardless of the facts.

The lords knew that the political stakes were too high to
allow both Libyans to walk free. Such a verdict would have exposed the
lies upon which nine years of UN sanctions, which have cost Libya US$33
billion and 10,000 lives, have been based. It would have also shed some
light on the cynical, sleazy and embarrassing political operations that
the US government is involved in throughout the world.

Review rejects key Lockerbie ‘evidence’

By Norm Dixon

14 July 2007

The Scottish
Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) ruled on June 28 that the 2001
conviction of Libyan citizen Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi —
sentenced to 27 years’ jail for allegedly bombing Pan Am flight 103,
which exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on December 21,
1988, killing 270 people — “may have suffered a miscarriage of
justice”. The SCCRC referred al Megrahi’s case to Scotland’s appeal
court.

According
to the commission’s chairperson, Graham Forbes, the SCCRC’s three-year,
£1.1 million inquiry, resulting in a still-secret 800-page report, made
its decision based on “new evidence we have found and new evidence that
was not before the trial court”. The commission interviewed 45
witnesses. That new evidence further discredits the testimony of the
prosecution’s key witness, Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci.

The original trial was held in the Netherlands but conducted
according to Scottish law and presided over by three Scottish judges,
known as law lords. The location was the result of an agreement between
Libya and the US and British governments that finally allowed the trial
to be heard in a “neutral” third country after a 10-year deadlock.

In their 2001 judgement, the law lords found that, despite
“uncertainties and qualifications”, “there is nothing in the evidence
which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the first
accused [al Megrahi]”. According to the lords, the prosecution’s
evidence convinced them that al Megrahi, Libyan Arab Airlines’ security
chief at Malta’s Luqa airport, had purchased distinctive items of
clothing from Gauci’s shop, Mary’s House, in Sliema, Malta, that
matched those that forensics experts had determined were in a Samsonite
suitcase that contained the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103.

The lords accepted that al Megrahi had somehow succeeded in having
the unaccompanied “item of baggage” loaded onto an Air Malta flight to
Frankfurt, where it was transferred to a second flight to London before
being eventually loaded onto the doomed aircraft (no evidence of how
this was achieved was presented). They dismissed alternative, simpler
and more plausible scenarios that the bomb was put aboard at Frankfurt
or London.

Tortuous path

At the time of al Megrahi’s conviction, respected legal observers —
including the official UN observer at the trial, Hans Koechler, and
Robert Black, the highly respected professor of Scottish law at
Edinburgh University who first suggested the plan for a third country
trial — were amazed that the law lords so readily accepted Gauci’s
partial and contradictory “identification” of al Megrahi as the person
who had purchased the clothes. The prosecution’s circumstantial,
speculative and convoluted case, and the judges’ guilty verdict, hinged
largely on the shopkeeper’s testimony.

In their verdict, the judges stated: “We are … satisfied that
[Gauci’s] identification so far as it went of [al Megrahi] as the
purchaser was reliable and should be treated as a highly important
element in this case.” However, the tortuous path Gauci’s
“identification” of al Megrahi alone should have ruled out a verdict
that al Megrahi was guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt”.

Gauci was first interviewed by police on September 1, 1989, and
described the purchaser as being “six feet or more” in height and well
built. On September 13, he told police the man was about 50 years old.
Megrahi is five feet, eight inches tall, of medium build and was 36
years old in December 1988.

On September 14, 1989, Gauci was shown 19 photos and identified a
man as being “similar” to the purchaser but added that the purchaser
was 20 years older. The identified man’s photo — who was not al Megrahi
— was included because police thought he resembled an artist’s
impression and an identikit portrait based on Gauci’s description. On
September 26, Gauci viewed more photos and pointed out another man. On
August 31, 1990, Gauci was shown 24 photos and pointed out a man who,
he said, had a face and hair like the purchaser. It was not al Megrahi.

On December 6, 1989, and again on September 10, 1990, Gauci was
shown photos but did not identify anybody. Included were photos of Abu
Talb, a Palestinian jailed in Sweden in 1989 for terrorist bombings.
But Gauci told the 2001 trial that in late 1989 or early 1990 his
brother had shown him a newspaper article about Lockerbie which
included a photo of a man with the word “bomber” printed across it.
Gauci said he thought it was either the man that bought the clothes
from him or resembled him. The man was Abu Talb.

On February 15, 1991, police showed Gauci 12 photos. He told police
that all the men in the photos were younger than the purchaser. The
police pressed Gauci to “allow for any age difference” and look again.
He pointed to a photo and said the man “resembles the man who bought
the clothing … of all the photographs I have been shown, this
photograph, eight, is the only one really similar to the man who bought
the clothing, if he is a bit older, other than the one my brother
showed me [of Abu Talb].” Photograph eight was al Megrahi’s 1986
passport photo.

Towards the end of 1998 or the beginning of 1999, Gauci approached
police after he was shown a magazine article about the Lockerbie
disaster which named al Megrahi as a suspect. He told police that the
photo of al Megrahi in the article “looks like the man” he sold clothes
to.

On August 13, 2000, Gauci picked out al Megrahi from an
identification parade with the words: “Not exactly the man I saw in the
shop. Ten years ago I saw him, but the man who look a little bit like
exactly [sic] is number 5.” At the trial, Gauci pointed to al Megrahi
and said he “resembles him a lot”.

In their verdict, the judges admitted that Gauci “never made what
could be described as an absolutely positive identification”. The
judges defended their assessment of Gauci’s “identification” with the
incredible statement: “There are situations where a careful witness who
will not commit himself beyond saying that there is a close resemblance
can be regarded as more reliable and convincing in his identification
than a witness who maintains that his identification is 100% certain.”

Gauci was also unclear as to when the items were purchased. On the
witness stand in 2001, he agreed the date was either November 23 or
December 7, 1988. The prosecution insisted it was December 7 and, in
the verdict, the judges did too.

However, in his statements to police and in his testimony at the
trial Gauci said that it had been, or was, raining when the purchaser
entered the shop. The nearby Luqa airport’s chief meteorologist
testified that it did not rain on December 7, but did so on November
23. Gauci’s brother had stated that the purchaser had entered the store
while he was away at a soccer match, which definitely took place on
November 23. The date was decisive because al Megrahi was not in Malta
on November 23. However, Abu Talb, the convicted bomber first
“identified” by Gauci, may have been.

New evidence

According to the SCCRC’s June 28 summary of its main findings,
“there is no reasonable basis in the [2001] trial court’s judgment for
its conclusion that the purchase of the items … took place on 7
December 1988”. The SCCRC found that “new evidence not heard at the
trial concerned the date on which the Christmas lights were illuminated
in the area of Sliema in which Mary’s House is situated … taken
together with Mr Gauci’s evidence at trial and the contents of his
police statements, this additional evidence indicates the purchase of
the items took place prior to 6 December 1988 [when Xmas lights were
illuminated] … it indicates that the purchase took place at a time when
there was no evidence at trial that [al Megrahi] was in Malta.”

The SCCRC also reported that additional evidence, not made
available to al Megrahi’s defence lawyers, showed that “four days prior
to the identification parade at which Mr Gauci picked out [al Megrahi],
he saw a photograph of [al Megrahi] in a magazine linking him to the
bombing … evidence of Mr Gauci’s exposure to this photograph in such
close proximity to the parade undermines the reliability of his
identification of [al Megrahi] …”

Without providing details, the SCCRC also cited “other evidence,
not made available to the defence, which the Commission believes may
further undermine Mr Gauci’s identification of [al Megrahi] as the
purchaser and the trial court’s finding as to the date of the
purchase”.

Jim Swire, a spokesperson for a significant group of victims’
families, said he hoped that the SCCRC decision and the subsequent
court appeal, which may not be heard for more than a year, would open
“a new chapter” in the search for the truth about the Lockerbie
disaster. “I went into that court in Holland [in 2001] thinking I was
going to see the trial of those who were responsible for the murder of
my daughter”, he told BBC Radio on June 29. “I came out thinking [al
Megrahi] had been framed.”

While the SCCRC upheld al Megrahi’s defence lawyers’ misgivings
about the reliability of Gauci’s evidence, it rejected most of the
other grounds for an appeal presented by the defence. These included
evidence that British and US authorities had planted and tampered with
crucial evidence to implicate al Megrahi and Libya, rather than a
German-based cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
— General Command (PFLP-GC) — a group Abu Talb was associated with.

For more than a year, US, Scottish and British investigators were
convinced that the Syrian-based PFLP-GC was the prime suspect. In
October 1990, Washington and London suddenly began pointing the finger
at Libya and started unearthing “evidence” out of the blue to justify
this. It coincided with the US military build-up in the Persian Gulf
following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In 1991, two Libyans — including
al Megrahi — were formally indicted.

What changed between 1988 and 1991? Syrian dictator Hafiz Assad was
an enthusiastic participant and key US ally in the 1991 Gulf War
against Iraq, whereas Libya’s leader Muammar Qadhafi opposed the war
and campaigned for a peaceful settlement.

Comments

The American media and political
establishment reacted to the release of the man convicted in the
bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 with outrage--but their slanders obscure
one of the most grotesque frame-ups of recent history, says Alan Maass.

September 4, 2009

"DESPICABLE." "OUTRAGEOUS." "An utter insult and utterly disgusting."

The slurs flew fast and furious after Scottish officials released
Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only man convicted for the 1989
bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed all
259 people on board and 11 people on the ground.

Officially, Megrahi was released on humanitarian grounds--he is
dying of cancer and has three months to live, according to doctors.
That produced a round of yammering from right-wing blowhards unfamiliar
with the concept of "humanitarian."

The volume got turned up even louder after some commentators decided
the British government must have pressured Scottish officials to secure
the release as part of a deal to gain greater access to Libyan oil. So
we were treated to the spectacle of Fox News pundits expressing their
shock that a government could sink so low in the pursuit of oil.

The Obama administration got on the bandwagon, too. Press Secretary
Robert Gibbs said a homecoming celebration that greeted Megrahi's
arrival at the airport in Libya was "tremendously offensive."

Nowhere in Gibbs' comments--nor in the American mainstream media's
coverage--was there a hint of why Libyans might celebrate Megrahi's
return. His conviction is widely regarded elsewhere in the
world--including among many families of British victims of the
bombing--as a travesty of justice engineered by the U.S. government.

More to the point, it is a travesty that might have unraveled
completely if Megrahi and his lawyers were able to continue with an
appeal in the Scottish courts to reexamine the verdict. Success with
that motion, said British writer John Palmer, "would show up the
Scottish judiciary as at best hopelessly incompetent and at worst
complicit in what one Lockerbie victim's parent has said was 'the
charade of a case' against Megrahi."

Megrahi said in a statement after his release that he agonized over
whether to accept the agreement that freed him, because it meant
dropping his appeal:

I have been faced with an appalling choice: to risk dying in prison in
the hope that my name is cleared posthumously or to return home still
carrying the weight of the guilty verdict, which will never now be
lifted. The choice which I made is a matter of sorrow, disappointment
and anger, which I fear I will never overcome.

Dr. Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died on Pan Am Flight 103,
echoed Megrahi's words. "I feel despondent that the West and Scotland
didn't have the guts to allow this man's second appeal to continue,"
said Swire, who is the spokesperson for an organization of family
members that has been demanding a public inquiry into what happened 20
years ago. "Because I am convinced that had they done so, it would have
overturned the verdict against him."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

MEGRAHI WAS convicted in 2001 of carrying out the Lockerbie bombing
after an extraordinary 18-month trial, presided over by three Scottish
judges, but held in the Netherlands.

Megrahi was accused along with another Libyan man, Al-Amin Khalifa
Fhimah--both were employees of Libyan Arab Airlines at the airport in
Malta, a country made up of a chain of islands south of Italy in the
Mediterranean Sea. But though prosecutors argued the two worked as a
team, Fhimah was found not guilty by a unanimous decision of the three
judges--while Megrahi was found guilty, also unanimously.

This contradictory verdict matched the quality of the evidence against the two:

-- The prosecution's star witness was revealed to be a CIA informant
who was paid more than $300,000 and resettled in the U.S. before the
trial, stood to gain millions in reward money for testifying--and had
to be interviewed 17 times by prosecutors before he came up with his
"evidence."

-- Megrahi and Fhimah were accused of getting a suitcase bomb on an
Air Malta flight from the airport where they worked. The suitcase was
then allegedly transferred twice, at airports in Frankfurt, Germany,
and London, to get it on Pan Am Flight 103. Prosecutors never produced
any evidence that the two men did get a suitcase on the flight.
But in any event, Air Malta has proved in court that all suitcases
carried on its flight to Frankfurt were accounted for. When a British
television producer repeated the prosecution's Malta flight theory in a
documentary, the airline sued for libel and won.

-- The only evidence connecting Megrahi to the bomb was the
testimony of a storeowner in Malta who said he remembered Megrahi
bought clothing that ended up in the same suitcase as the bomb,
according to an analysis of material found in the wreckage of the
aircraft. But the storeowner didn't make this identification until 11
years after the bombing. He originally described a man who was bigger
and older than Megrahi, and there is evidence that Megrahi wasn't even
in Malta on the day he supposedly bought the clothes.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

EVEN MORE incredible than the shoddiness of the case against Megrahi
is the lengths to which the British and U.S. governments went to avoid accusing and prosecuting the seemingly obvious suspects.

The Lockerbie bombing took place four days before Christmas in 1989.
Eighteen months before, the USS Vincennes, a U.S. Navy cruiser on
patrol in the Persian Gulf, shot down an Iran Air passenger plane,
killing all 290 people on board.

U.S. officials claimed their ship mistook the giant Airbus for an
attacking F-14 jet fighter, but that beggared belief, especially in the
political context--the shootdown took place in the final year of the
Iraq-Iran War, after the U.S. had swung more and more openly behind
Iraq and its new favorite Middle East ally, Saddam Hussein.

George Bush Sr., then vice president under Ronald Reagan, declared,
"I'll never apologize...I don't care what the facts are." When he took
over the White House the following year, Bush decorated the Vincennes'
captain with the Legion of Merit medal.

Anger in Iran at the U.S. attack was intense, and the country's
leaders vowed revenge. A year later, the outlines of one possible
attempt emerged.

Several men from a Palestinian splinter group not connected to the
mainstream liberation movement and with a record of carrying out
terrorist attacks were arrested in Neuss, Germany, a two-hour drive
from the city of Frankfurt. Among the belongings of one was a bomb
built into a Toshiba cassette recorder that was almost identical to the
device that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 later that year. The German
police released the men because of a lack of evidence.

In early December, the U.S. embassy received a phone call from a man
who said that a Pan Am flight originating in Frankfurt would be blown
up in the next two weeks by a Palestinian militant group. U.S.
officials took the warning seriously--the State Department circulated
it to European embassies, and as a result, personnel who typically took
December Pan Am flights to return home for the holidays booked on other
carriers.

Even without this information, speculation after the December 21
explosion immediately centered on Iran and Syria, not Libya. The
evidence from the wreckage yielded the remains of the bomb similar to
ones constructed by the men in Germany.

The conclusion seemed inescapable--Palestinian operatives, supported
by Syria and financed by Iran, had avenged the shooting down of the
Iranian plane. Three months after Lockerbie, a Cabinet minister from
Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party government in Britain bragged to
journalists that arrests were imminent.

Then George Bush Sr. stepped back into the picture.

According to a Washington Post report, Bush personally
contacted Margaret Thatcher and urged that the Lockerbie investigation
be made "low key," in his words, according to leaked accounts of the
conversation. Thatcher apparently complied--there were no arrests or
charges.

Why would the U.S. want to downplay allegations against Palestinian
terrorists paid by Iran--then still public enemy number one in the
Middle East, at least publicly?

Some of the shadowy events surrounding Lockerbie provided possible reasons.

For one thing, U.S. intelligence agents knew about the arrests in
Germany, but apparently didn't move aggressively. Other revelations in
Britain pointed in a different direction--that an embarrassing security
breach at Heathrow Airport may have allowed the bombers to put the
explosives on board there.

Investigators for Pan Am turned up a more startling possibility.
They concluded that U.S. intelligence officials, seeking to free
American hostages held in Lebanon, had struck a deal with Syrian drug
dealers connected to the hostage takers.

In exchange for information about the hostages, the investigators
claimed, CIA agents would route drugs from Lebanon into the U.S. in
luggage that was exempt from normal airport security procedures.
Interfor, the security firm hired by Pan Am, speculated that the drug
dealers may have switched a suitcase containing a bomb with one filled
with drugs.

Interfor further suggested that Charles McKeen, the head of a U.S.
intelligence team traveling on Pan Am Flight 103, was coming back to
Washington to blow the whistle on the drug operation--and that his
colleagues may have looked the other way as the bomb plot developed.

If that seems far-fetched, it should be remembered that the White
House was now inhabited by Bush, a former head of the CIA, and staffed
by the men who came up with the Iran-contra arms-for-hostages operation
under Reagan--selling military supplies to a country they publicly
denounced as an enemy of peace in exchange for freeing American
hostages in Lebanon, with the proceeds from the arms sales going to the
right-wing contras fighting to overthrow Nicaragua's Sandinista
government.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

WHATEVER THE truth of these allegations, a major political shift in
the Middle East soon provided an even more compelling reason for
finding a new scapegoat for Lockerbie.

On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait, threatening
the flow of Middle East oil through the Persian Gulf. The Bush
administration instantly denounced its recent ally as the "new Hitler"
and began preparing the ground for the largest American military
intervention since Vietnam.

Bush was determined to overcome the "Vietnam Syndrome" by building a
coalition of countries that would support a war on Iraq. Suddenly,
Syria went from enemy to valuable ally in the battle against Saddam's
tyranny. Syria's possible role in Lockerbie disappeared--as did Iran's
when it made clear it would stay neutral in the coming Gulf War.

Libya under Muammar el-Qaddafi was one of the only Middle Eastern
countries to resist U.S. incentives to join the "coalition of nations"
against Iraq. In short order, U.S. propaganda replaced the Iranian
regime with Qaddafi as the chief sponsor of terrorism in U.S.
propaganda.

In November 1991, the U.S. and British governments finally ended
their "low key" attitude toward Lockerbie with the announcement that
they were charging two Libyan airline employees--Megrahi and
Fhimah--with planting the bomb. All the previous references to the
involvement of Syria, Iran or Palestine vanished. Bush himself
explicitly said that Syria had gotten a "bum rap" on Lockerbie.

As British socialist and journalist Paul Foot wrote in the Guardian:

[T]he U.S. and British governments' propaganda machines worked night
and day to rubbish the story they had so successfully peddled. Pretty
well the entire media in Britain and the U.S. complied. Libya was
denounced with the same stale invective previously reserved for the
Iranians and Syrians.

None of the facts had changed. The only change was political. The
new enemy of the Western powers was their former favorite, Saddam
Hussein. In the Gulf War for a new world order, the ruthless Syrian
dictator Assad was a vital ally. Iran was neutral. It was suddenly
obvious that neither of these two governments could possibly have had
anything to do with Lockerbie.

It seemed for a while that Libya would refuse to extradite Megrahi
and Fhimah to stand trial. But in 1999, Qaddafi's government turned
over the two men to be tried in the Netherlands. Sanctions against
Libya were promptly dropped, and Western multinationals invested
billions in Libya's oil industry. Another "Hitler" of the Middle East
was transformed into an ally.

A campaign to show Megrahi's innocence continued after the travesty
of his trial, with family members of the Lockerbie victims among its
most committed activists. Former South African President Nelson Mandela
traveled to Scotland to visit Megrahi in prison and declared his
support.

Megrahi's lawyers lost their first appeal of his conviction, but
were preparing for a second that they hoped would expose the facts of
the frame-up for the world to see. It was this appeal that was
short-circuited by the agreement that sent Megrahi home.

Megrahi does not have long to enjoy the freedom he deserves. As this
article was being written, he was being treated in an intensive care
unit of a hospital in Tripoli, according to reports.

But the U.S. political establishment still heaps slanders on him.
Its callous attitude toward the truth is, in Foot's words, "a terrible
indictment of the cynicism, hypocrisy and deceit of the British and
U.S. governments and their intelligence services. Which is probably why
[that truth] has been so consistently and haughtily ignored."

The furor over the "compassionate release"
of the so-called Lockerbie bomber, Libyan Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi,
is obscuring the suppression of facts in the case.

September 9, 2009

THE HYSTERIA over the release of the so-called
Lockerbie bomber reveals much about the political and media class on
both sides of the Atlantic, especially Britain. From Gordon Brown's
"repulsion" to Barack Obama's "outrage," the theater of lies and
hypocrisy is dutifully attended by those who call themselves
journalists.

"But what if Megrahi lives longer than three months?" whined a BBC
reporter to the Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond. "What will you
say to your constituents, then?"

Horror of horrors that a dying man should live longer than
prescribed before he "pays" for his "heinous crime": the description of
the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, whose "compassion"
allowed Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi to go home to Libya to "face
justice from a higher power." Amen.

The American satirist Larry David once addressed a voluble crony as
"a babbling brook of bullshit." Such eloquence summarizes the circus of
Megrahi's release.

No one in authority has had the guts to state the truth about the
bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 above the Scottish village of Lockerbie on
December 21, 1988, in which 270 people were killed. The governments in
England and Scotland in effect blackmailed Megrahi into dropping his
appeal as a condition of his immediate release.

Of course, there were oil and arms deals under way with Libya; but
had Megrahi proceeded with his appeal, some 600 pages of new and
deliberately suppressed evidence would have set the seal on his
innocence and given us more than a glimpse of how and why he was
stitched up for the benefit of "strategic interests."

"The endgame came down to damage limitation," said the former CIA
officer Robert Baer, who took part in the original investigation,
"because the evidence amassed by [Megrahi's] appeal is explosive and
extremely damning to the system of justice."

New witnesses would show that it was impossible for Megrahi to have
bought clothes that were found in the wreckage of the Pan Am
aircraft--he was convicted on the word of a Maltese shop owner who
claimed to have sold him the clothes, then gave a false description of
him in 19 separate statements and even failed to recognize him in the
courtroom.

The new evidence would have shown that a fragment of a circuit board
and bomb timer "discovered" in the Scottish countryside and said to
have been in Megrahi's suitcase was probably a plant. A forensic
scientist found no trace of an explosion on it. The new evidence would
demonstrate the impossibility of the bomb beginning its journey in
Malta before it was "transferred" through two airports undetected to
Flight 103.

A "key secret witness" at the original trial, who claimed to have
seen Megrahi and his co-accused al-Alim Khalifa Fahimah (who was
acquitted) loading the bomb on to the plane at Frankfurt, was bribed by
the U.S. authorities holding him as a "protected witness." The defense
exposed him as a CIA informer who stood to collect, on the Libyans'
conviction, up to $4 million as a reward.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

MEGRAHI WAS convicted by three Scottish judges sitting in a
courtroom in "neutral" Holland. There was no jury. One of the few
reporters to sit through the long and often farcical proceedings was
the late Paul Foot, whose landmark investigation in Private Eye exposed it as a cacophony of blunders, deceptions and lies: a whitewash.

The Scottish judges, while admitting a "mass of conflicting
evidence" and rejecting the fantasies of the CIA informer, found
Megrahi guilty on hearsay and unproven circumstance. Their 90-page
"opinion," wrote Foot, "is a remarkable document that claims an honored
place in the history of British miscarriages of justice."
("Lockerbie--the Flight from Justice" by Paul Foot can be downloaded
from private-eye.co.uk [2]).

Foot reported that most of the staff of the U.S. embassy in Moscow
who had reserved seats on Pan Am flights from Frankfurt cancelled their
bookings when they were alerted by U.S. intelligence that a terrorist
attack was planned.

He named Margaret Thatcher the "architect" of the cover-up after
revealing that she killed the independent inquiry her transport
secretary Cecil Parkinson had promised the Lockerbie families; and in a
phone call to President George Bush Sr. on January 11, 1990, she agreed
to "low-key" the disaster after their intelligence services had
reported "beyond doubt" that the Lockerbie bomb had been placed by a
Palestinian group contracted by Tehran as a reprisal for the shooting
down of an Iranian airliner by a U.S. warship in Iranian territorial
waters. Among the 290 dead were 66 children. In 1990, the ship's
captain was awarded the Legion of Merit by Bush Sr. "for exceptionally
meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as
commanding officer."

Peversely, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, Bush needed
Iran's support as he built a "coalition" to expel his wayward client
from an American oil colony. The only country that defied Bush and
backed Iraq was Libya. "Like lazy and overfed fish," wrote Foot, "the
British media jumped to the bait. In almost unanimous chorus, they
engaged in furious vilification and op en warmongering against Libya."

The framing of Libya for the Lockerbie crime was inevitable. Since
then, a U.S. defense intelligence agency report, obtained under Freedom
of Information, has confirmed these truths and identified the likely
bomber; it was to be centerpiece of Megrahi's defense.

In 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred
Megrahi's case for appeal. "The commission is of the view," said its
chairman, Dr. Graham Forbes, "that based upon our lengthy
investigations, the new evidence we have found and other evidence which
was not before the trial court, that the applicant may have suffered a
miscarriage of justice."

The words "miscarriage of justice" are missing entirely from the
current furor, with Kenny MacAskill reassuring the baying mob that the
scapegoat will soon face justice from that "higher power." What a
disgrace.

John Pilger is a renowned investigative reporter and documentary
filmmaker who was called "the most outstanding journalist in the world
today" by the Guardian. He is the author of numerous books, including most recently Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire [4], a collection of investigations into the effects of war crimes and globalization. His books and films are featured at JohnPilger.com [5].

Archbishop
Desmond Tutu has backed the Scottish Government's decision to release
the Lockerbie bomber on compassionate grounds, it emerged today.

The
South African cleric said Scottish Justice secretary Kenny MacAskill's
decision to allow Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, who has terminal
cancer, to return home to die in Libya should be "commended."

In a message to the Scottish Government, Archbishop Tutu welcomed the bomber's return home.

"I
believe the Scottish Justice Secretary's decision to release Mr
al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds is to be commended," said the
former Nobel Peace prize winner.

"One
understands the anguish of family members and friends of the victims
but they honour their memory more by being compassionate than
retributive."

He is the second world figure to back the release in recent weeks, after Nelson Mandela also welcomed the move.

Megrahi is the only man to be convicted over the 1988 PanAm airline bombing which resulted in 270 deaths.

President
Barack Obama has said Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill was
wrong to order the compassionate release of Ali al-Megrahi, a former
Libyan Intelligence agent who was the only man convicted of the
December 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, an appalling act of
terrorism that killed all 259 passengers aboard and 11 more on the
ground in Lockerbie, Scotland.

“We
have been in contact with the Scottish government, indicating that we
objected to this, and we thought it was a mistake," Obama declared.

The
President, however, did not appear to be fully informed about the
Megrahi case, perhaps understandable given the one-sided coverage that
it has received in the US news media. Left out of much of that coverage
was the fact that in 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review
Commission agreed to reconsider Megrahi’s conviction in 2001 out of a
strong concern that it had been a miscarriage of justice.

Lamen
Khalifa, Megrahi’s co-defendant, had been acquitted and the evidence
presented against Khalifa was nearly the same as that presented against
Megrahi. Further, the verdict by the three-judge panel was for a
complete acquittal for Khalifa, rather than a “not proven” verdict,
which would have implied a less certain judgment.

The
panel’s principal stated reason for finding Megrahi guilty – while
exonerating Khalifa – was the testimony of Toni Gauci, the owner of a
clothing store, Mary’s House, in Malta. Gauci allegedly sold a shirt to
Megrahi, the remnants of which were found with the shards of the
suitcase that contained the bomb. The shirt was traced to Gauci’s shop.

The
remainder of the case rested on a theory that Megrahi could have put
the luggage on a flight from Malta to Frankfurt, where it was
transferred to a connecting flight to London, where it was transferred
onto Pan Am 103 bound for New York, a decidedly idiosyncratic way to
undertake an act of terrorism given the random variables involved.

It
would be a brilliant example of evil genius – or a case of bewildering
stupidity – to assume that at a time of heightened scrutiny about
possible airline terrorism that an unaccompanied bag would be
mindlessly transferred from plane to plane to plane.

For
the prosecution’s theory to be correct, one would have to assume that
three separate airport security systems – at Malta, Frankfort and
London – failed to give any serious scrutiny to an unaccompanied
suitcase or to detect the bomb despite security officials being on the
lookout for just such a threat.

(And
as historian William Blum recounted in a Consortiumnews.com article
after Megrahi’s 2001 conviction, “The case for the suitcase's
hypothetical travels must also deal with the fact that, according to
Air Malta, all the documented luggage on KM180 was collected by
passengers in Frankfurt and did not continue in transit to London, and
that two Pan Am on-duty officials in Frankfurt testified that no
unaccompanied luggage was introduced onto Pan Am 103A, the feeder
flight to London.”)

Plus,
there was the problem with Gauci’s belated identification of Megrahi as
the shirt-buyer 10 years after the fact (and only after Gauci had made
contradictory IDs and given a physical description that didn’t match
Megrahi).

The
chief reason that Megrahi’s new appeal was ordered in 2007 was that the
Scottish review panel found Gauci’s testimony unbelievable. Gauci had
been interviewed 17 times by Scottish and Maltese police prior to
Megrahi’s trial and often gave conflicting testimony as to the dates
and times he claims to have sold the shirt to Megrahi.

Gauci
also reportedly received a $2 million reward for his testimony and has
since moved to Australia, where he lives in retirement with his brother.

Apart
from the evidence given by Gauci, the entire case against Megrahi was
circumstantial at best. Indeed, it was more a hypothetical construct,
which showed that it was a theoretical possibility – assuming a variety
of unlikely events lined up in an implausible manner – that Megrahi
could have been the bomber, but not that he was guilty beyond a
reasonable doubt.

Megrahi’s
conviction, however, did serve the understandable human desire to see
someone punished for the heinous crime. The original accusations
against him in the early 1990s also fit with the geopolitical interests
of powerful figures in Washington and London.

Plus, Megrahi’s background as a member of Libya’s intelligence service made him a target easy to demonize.

After
Megrahi’s conviction in 2001, Libya was placed under severe sanctions
by the United Nations, making materials for Libya’s oil industry,
available for the most part only from the United States, exponentially
more costly and thus more profitable for companies that could evade the
embargo.

To
export some of this machinery and equipment to Libya, American firms
used dummy firms, little more than post office boxes in offshore
locations, to handle the transfer of the materials to Libya at
significantly inflated prices.

While
these methods appeared to be illegal, it was difficult to gather
sufficient evidence to prosecute, according to the Justice Department.
American oil-field workers also continued to travel to Libya, albeit by
boat rather than airplane.

To
get the costly sanctions lifted, Libya was required to accept
"responsibility" for the Pan Am 103 bombing and pay about $1.8 billion
in compensation to the victims’ families. Libya, however, never
admitted that it actually had carried out the bombing and Megrahi
continued to protest his innocence.

After
Megrahi’s release last month as a humanitarian gesture because he is
suffering from terminal prostate cancer, the US news media, American
politicians and some victims’ family members went into overdrive with
their condemnations of what they called Megrahi’s “hero’s welcome” back
to Libya.

The
outrage in the United States might have been more measured if the US
press corps had reprised the fragility of the case against Megrahi, but
his conviction was treated nearly universally as a closed case.

The
reaction in the UK and elsewhere was more tempered, although British
authorities did come under criticism for allegedly mixing the Megrahi
case with efforts to expand oil trade with Libya.

“Why
is there such an apparent divide between the US and British relatives”
of the Pan Am 103 victims? asked Pamela Dix, writing in the UK’s
Guardian. “Why do they [the Americans] believe he is guilty, and we
remain to be convinced?”

Dix
then posed as a possible answer: “Britain is a country that has
experienced terrorism first hand for many years, and has also seen
numerous miscarriages of justice where innocent people were convicted
and jailed for terrorist crimes they did not commit. So it is no
surprise that many British relatives have a scrupulous desire to ensure
this does not happen again.”

There
have been examples of the US news media making brief references to
Megrahi’s continued claims of innocence but the evidence of his
innocence has been played down or ignored.

For
instance, you have to read to the end of a recent New York Times
article, which puzzles over why Qaddafi had “overreached” in welcoming
Megrahi home, to spot this stunning revelation by Dirk Vandewalle,
associate professor of government at Dartmouth.

“I
remember talking to one of the judges from the panel that convicted
him,” Vandewalle recalled. “He said there was enormous pressure put on
the court to get a conviction.”

This
comment from one of the Scottish judges – indicating that Megrahi was
railroaded – was extraordinary, and it might have gone a long way to
explain why the Libyans hailed Megrahi as a hero: because they consider
him an innocent man wrongly imprisoned in large part because he was a
Libyan. But the judge's admission was ignored by most of the US news
media.

Instead,
the US press corps joined the outrage over Megrahi’s release and
published, without skepticism, a harsh attack from FBI Director Robert
Mueller, who had been a US prosecutor involved in the Pan Am 103
investigation.

In
a letter to Scottish Justice Secretary MacAskill, Mueller wrote: "I
have made it a practice not to comment on the actions of other
prosecutors,” but "your decision to release Megrahi causes me to
abandon that practice in this case. I do so because I am familiar with
the facts, and the law. ...

“And I do so because I am outraged at your decision, blithely defended on the grounds of 'compassion.'"

Mueller
said Megrahi's release "makes a mockery of the rule of law" and "gives
comfort to terrorists around the world who now believe that regardless
of the quality of the investigation ... the terrorist will be freed by
one man's exercise of 'compassion.'"

However,
the intensity of Mueller’s protest may have been meant more to obscure
the weakness of the case against Megrahi and to further discourage the
US press corps from reexamining the evidence, including the possibility
that other terrorist elements in the Middle East may have been
responsible -- and that the FBI had bungled the whole affair.

Despite
the fact that warnings of a possible terrorist attack on Pan Am 103
were circulating in 1988, the FBI and CIA failed to take effective
action, especially regarding the chief suspect, the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, or the P.F.L.P.-G.C.
headed by Ahmed Jabril.

At
the time, there was strong evidence that Iran was desperate to get
revenge for the destruction of Iran Air Flight 655 on July 3, 1988, by
a missile fired from the American destroyer, the USS. Vincennes. Though
excused by US officials as an unfortunate mistake, the missile killed
290 people aboard, including 66 children.

The
PFLP-GC allegedly received several million dollars from Iranians to get
revenge. The evidence of this Iranian/PFLP-GC collaboration included
interviews with PFLP-GC intelligence officer, Major M. Tunayb, who
identified one of the group’s members as the person who planted the
bomb in a suitcase that was carried onto Pan Am 103.

Knowledge
of this complicated history among Europeans is one of the reasons that
there has been a more subdued reaction to the Megrahi release in Europe
than in the United States, where the fury has bordered on hysteria.

In
the United States, some members of a victims’ families association are
calling for a boycott of Scottish goods and tourism in retaliation for
the decision, while also demanding the resignation of the Scottish
Justice Secretary and a personal apology from British Prime Minister
Gordon Brown.

President
Obama’s response also has been disappointing to some people who have
followed the case closely, which he apparently has not. His comments
critical of the release seemed to be calculated not to challenge "the
Libyans-did-it" conventional wisdom of the US news media nor to invite
the anger of the victims’ families.

As
for the US news media, it clearly finds selling outrage and pain a lot
easier than confronting the difficult issues raised by the Megrahi
case. Some journalists also might cringe at the possibility of being
labeled “Libyan apologists” or “conspiracy theorists” if they challenge
the official story.

As
part of the deal for his release on humanitarian grounds, Megrahi was
forced to drop his appeal, which could mean that the Pan Am 103 bombing
will remain a mystery forever – and that a host of politically touchy
questions will never be answered.

Morgan Strong is a former professor of Middle Eastern history, and was an advisor to CBS News “60 Minutes” on the Middle East.

The clamour following the release of Abdelbaset Ali Al-Megrahi has hardly died down.

‘Terrorist celebrated in Libya’ barked the headlines of U.S. media.

What shame and hypocrisy!

Why shouldn’t Al-Megrahi be returned to a hero’s welcome and be met with scenes of jubilation, especially by his family members, relatives and close friends? Wasn’t the hero’s welcome given to Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, the other accused and acquitted, equally and rightfully deserving?

Back in 2001, when Al-Megrahi was convicted of the bombing by a Scottish court, the newspapers were filled with pictures of happy relatives of the victims of the 1988 bombing of PanAm 103. Admittedly, they had believed that justice had been meted out, albeit doubtfully.

So, what’s wrong with welcoming home a man whom his countrymen strongly believe to have been unjustly convicted?

What disturbs me most about this matter is the revenge motif. It seems that revenge is a dish best served cold, off the human menu and serves no genuine purpose. The lack of compassion expressed by some shows that they are no better than any terrorist.

I lived in Libya for over three years, so know first hand that most Libyan people are peaceful, hospitable, and generous. The spontaneous warm celebration welcoming this unfortunate man back home does, beyond any doubt, credit to them.

Moreover, not only Libya but various other competent authorities, have

always perceived Al-Megrahi as innocent.

As he quite rightly said: “I have returned to Tripoli with my UNJUST conviction still in place.” It is extremely shameful for anyone saying that his attempt to challenge his conviction and clear his name is deplorable. Where have we arrived at? Is it justice to deprive one the chance of proving his innocence?

Although it appears that the U.S. President was not properly informed about the Al-Megrahi case, he did not hesitate to condemn Scottish Justice for his compassionate release. And what now. Mr. President, if Mr. Al-Megrahi, is finally proved innocent? Perhaps, if the U.S. President cares to give the Al-Megrahi’s conviction a second look, reading the book, ‘Cover-up of Convenience – The Hidden Scandal of Lockerbie’, co-authored by Ian Ferguson, an investigative journalist, would surely restrain him from being so vociferous in his unabashed convictions!

When asked whether Britain would consider reimbursing Libya in the event of Mr. Al-Megrahi’s exoneration, all at the Foreign Office declined to comment.

What was the reason that the film, ‘The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie’,

was so fiercely criticised by the U.S. and British governments that subsequently it had to be withdrawn from public viewing?

Truth is everyone’s right and it seems it is still being denied to us.

In a move agreed to by the US and British governments, Libya had offered compensation to the relatives of those killed in the bombing.

In February, 2004, the Libyan Prime Minister formally declared that his country was innocent but was forced to pay-up as a "price for peace". The Libyan government paid the relatives of the Lockerie victims £803 million in compensation.

The conditions in the deal included; the lifting of the United Nations sanctions against Libya, the removal of U.S. sanctions and the removal of Libya from the U.S. list of States ‘sponsoring terrorism’. Anything goes as long as it’s paid for! At that time even the Maltese government had offered support to the Libyan stance. Anything goes as long as it’s paid for!

The only objections to the Libyan initiative had come from the French government. Citing the much lower sums offered by Libya to relatives of victims of another aircraft bombing, the French government has demanded a comparable level of compensation for the victims. The victim’s relatives were paid up to $33,000 each by Libya, in contrast with $10 million each for relatives of victims of PA 103. Still more avarice! A ceaseless overwhelming desire for more.

How many of the relatives of victims of the Lockerbie bombing, recently protesting outside the U.N. building at President Gaddafi's appearance, were recipients of Libya’s contributions?

Seif Al Islam Gaddafi, son of the Libyan leader, angered Lockerbie victims relatives last years when he said they were ‘very greedy’ and ‘trading with the blood of their sons and daughters’ in their battle for compensation’. That’s nothing but the honest truth!

If the release of Mr. Megrahi was based on greed, as has been implied by various media, it definitely wasn’t from the side of the Libyan government.

Contagious avarice

When the British were calling the I.R.A. terrorists, American sympathizers funded and protected them and called them ‘freedom fighters’.

Remember the wisecrack – ‘the safest place to be in London during an IRA bombing campaign was any branch of McDonalds, as they would never ever blow up a business outlet of one of their US supporters’.

Previously, the British government had always stated it would not intervene in compensation claims brought by victims of explosives and weaponry allegedly supplied to the IRA by Libya.

Still reeling from the row surrounding the release of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, has now changed his stance to support compensation claims against Libya by victims of IRA attacks.
In a shameless U-turn, Gordon Brown has now thrown his support behind the victims of IRA bombings when they head to Libya to demand compensation from Colonel Gaddafi, including the assignment of a dedicated staff from the foreign office to support the victims and their families. Hopefully, if the Libyan government accepts to donate compensation, the U.S. government will not let itself be outdone and would likewise agree to offer a hefty compensation!

But President Gaddafi's son, Saif al Islam, told Sky News that the matter will be argued in court.

"Anyone can knock at our door and ask for money," he said. "But we go to the courts. They have their lawyers, we have our lawyers."

I am convinced that none can disagree with his statement that any such claims will be rejected.

Libya must no longer remain captive to greed.

Finally, may I suggest to all who are still dubious about the facts regarding the Lockerbie drama and are willing to learn the whole story to visit the new website: ‘Abdelbaset Ali Al-Megrahi - My Story’.

“Justice must prevail beyond all other considerations. Beyond politics, convictions, religion, even compassion (and certainly expedience), regardless of one's sympathies, JUSTICE must be the banner that unites us. This is more than pity for a dying man; this is a demand for justice.” (Danton de Vouvray)

“Most of the greater evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.” Bertrand Russell

So, finally he is set free from bondage! Or is he?? Definitely yes, but not from the responsibility of proving his innocence. This is deserved and merited by all, but mostly by the alleged victim himself, Al-Megrehi and his family, as well as all the family members and friends of the victims of the fatal accident and all honest and decent people craving for proper and befitting justice to all concerned. The outrage at the release of Al-Megrahi should not overshadow the memory of the trial that condemned and sentenced him.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi has never stopped reiterating his innocence and non-involvement in the blowing up of the Pan Am Flight 103 on December 21, 1988 over Lockerbie.

A lot has been said about such release on ‘compassionate grounds’, but I understand that mercy and compassion are only bestowed on the repentant - that is, those who acknowledge their fault. Thus, a pardon requires the acknowledgement of the crime, a fact which Al-Megrahi never acknowledged.

As Ian Ferguson, author of the book “The Hidden Scandal of Lockerbie”, points out: ‘From the start, there was a determination to try to prevent the appeal being heard. It opened but never got off the ground, with stall after stall, as each month Al-Megrahi weakened with the cancer that was killing him. There was rejoicing in the Crown Office in Edinburgh when he was released and the appeal abandoned.’

In this regard, it should be ensured that beyond any hindrance or censorship, all assistance and co-operation should be extended to Al-Megrahi to enable him to deservedly affirm his innocence.

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) had already granted him a second appeal. His legal team has been trying to see the secret papers which they believe could help overturn his conviction. However, Foreign Secretary David Miliband has signed a public interest(?) immunity certificate, claiming that making the document public could cause “real harm” to national security and international relations. Of course, and stopping a convicted man from proving his innocence!! Is this intended to thwart any redress or amends by Al-Megrahi?

When only selected evidence is available and the defence does not even get to see parts of it, then the conviction becomes unsound.

Does anyone seriously believe that a Scottish Government would release a man convicted of murdering innocents, unless there was good reason for considering that conviction to be more than a manipulated conspiracy?

What Cheek!

It was more than nauseating to note how some dazed or perhaps swayed media played upon the trumped-up assumption of ‘worldwide condemnation’ for his release. Oh no; nothing of the sort! What we see here is just a cynical U.S. condemnation and filthy politics. Playing politics in this matter is the politics of the gutter!

The UK and the U.S. have their differences regarding the law and justice that they may not agree on. The elaborate and shadowy politics behind the Lockerbie trail, including these same American families that are complaining about Megrahi's release, also took blood money from Ghaddafi, as far as a $2 billion dollar settlement.

Do you not remember how the U.S. military personnel responsible for the shooting down of the Iranian flight Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 passengers including 66 children received a medal? What remuneration did the families of the victims receive?

Everybody seems to forget that the Cuban terrorist, Luis Posada Carrilles, who bombed a Cuban plane in 1976 killing 73 people, got paroled by Bush and is walking free in the US, although Venezuelan and Cuban authorities have requested his extradition. Where is the outcry about this? Are American lives worth more than others?

If I were to record all U.S. hypocrisy, I would never stop writing.
So, U.S. Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton reiterated her opposition and condemnation to the release of the alleged Lockerbie bomber in a strongly-worded message to the Scottish government. She stressed that it was “absolutely wrong” to release Megrahi. What is she afraid of? Could it be the absolute truth?

I would here dare to suggest two main reasons why the U.S. Administration is highlighting its disdainful opposition to this release.

Firstly, it is more than apparent to the world at large that America cannot accept a decision, not in line with its policy, made in another country and is prepared to spout its wrath against it.

Secondly, as according to the lawyer of Al-Megrahi, he was in a “very real risk” and could die before his appeal, after a judge’s illness caused further delay in the case, it was evident that his release would eliminate this immediate danger and raise all possibilities for a final honest outcome of this affair.

Perhaps in Europe we ought to ask if the USA is indeed our ally any more. It is not customary for allies to boycott each other when they disagree.

On the other hand, high profile supporters, including Nelson Mandela and Michael Mansfield QC among others, strongly maintain that Megrahi is innocent.

What did the Americans want? Perhaps that he should be let to die in prison and to have the dead body handed to the U.S. so that they could ‘execute’ it?

Against the judgement of a number of embassy officials, on the evening before the trial, the U.S. Embassy hosted a reception in Zeist for family members of the Lockerbie victims.

So, United States President Barack Obama and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon on Monday praised Senator Jim Webb for facilitating the release of American John William Yettaw but at the same time urged Burma’s ruling junta to release opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

So could the members from the USA Administration do us the favour of stepping down from their platform of moralising on world events?

The Malta connection

Although the political furore over the release of Al-Megrahi mainly centred around three countries, namely Britain, the U.S. and Libya, there may well have been covert dealings, until now kept secret, which had been hatched in other countries. New and compelling evidence has now been released which would may now well prove his innocence.

In a memo dated September 24, 1989, and reproduced in the appeal submission, the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) states: ‘The bombing of the Pan Am flight was conceived, authorised and financed by Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur, Iran’s former Interior Minister. The execution of the operation was contracted to Ahmad (Jibril), Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC) leader, for a sum of $1 million.’
The prosecution case was that Al-Megrahi took the bomb, wrapped in clothes bought from a shop in Malta, to the island's Luqa airport, where it was checked in and then transferred onto Pan Am flight 103.
A key witness against al-Megrahi was the Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, who owned Mary's House, where the police say the garments were bought.
Also, central to Al-Megrahi’s conviction was the evidence of this Maltese shopkeeper, who claimed that Al-Megrahi had bought clothes allegedly found in the suitcase bomb. Lawyers were due to claim that Gauci was paid over a $2 million reward by U.S. investigators for his evidence, which followed more than 20 police interviews, and that many of the often wildly conflicting statements taken on each occasion were withheld from the defence
But his police statements are inconsistent, and prosecutors failed to tell the defence that shortly before he attended an identity parade, Mr. Gauci had seen a magazine article showing a picture of Megrahi, and speculating he might have been involved. The BBC programme has discovered that the Scottish police knew Mr Gauci had looked at al-Megrahi's photograph just days before the line-up.
But contrary to police rules of disclosure, designed to ensure a fair trial, this crucial information was not passed on to the defence.
Besides that, if it were proven that he was rewarded, his testimony casts doubt on its value.

The SCCRC has thoroughly checked out the claims and found he received ‘a phenomenal sum of money’ from the U.S. It is reported that Gauci is understood to be planning to use his newfound wealth to fund a move to Australia with his brother, Paul, who was also on the witness list but was not called to give evidence.
Professor Emeritus Robert Black of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh, 'architect' of the Scottish court on Dutch soil (and himself from Lockerbie) said of the original conviction: "I thought this was a very, very weak circumstantial case. I am absolutely astounded, astonished. I was extremely reluctant to believe that any Scottish judge would convict anyone, even a Libyan, on the basis of such evidence."
He said in 2005 that Al-Megrahi's conviction was "the most disgraceful miscarriage of justice in Scotland for 100 years." "Every lawyer who has ... read the judgment says 'this is nonsense'. It is nonsense. It really distresses me; I won't let it go."
It is no wonder that some people were hoping that Al-Megrahi would die before certain witnesses were called. The release on compassionate grounds is a blessing for them, as much as it is for him.

The key lesson is that the human rights of all parties need to be at the centre of the legal process and decision making if the public interest is to be served, and if justice is to be done and be seen to be done.

The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.

Claim refers to concerns raised about safety of Libyan's conviction for Lockerbie bombing in 1988.

The man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing released evidence today claiming to show that a key witness at his trial received payments from the US after giving evidence.

The claim is made in documents published online by Abdelbaset al-Megrahi in support of his attempt to clear his name of involvement in the worst terrorist attack on British soil.

It refers to concerns raised by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) about the safety of Megrahi's conviction for killing 270 people in the Lockerbie bombing on 21 December 1988.

The documents would have formed part of an appeal, which Megrahi, who is terminally ill, agreed to drop in return for his release on compassionate grounds.

The commission found police memos suggesting that Tony Gauci, the only witness to link the Libyan to the alleged plot, expressed an interest in being paid to give evidence. He also received payments from the US department of justice after the trial, the new documents claim to show.

The commission said the documents should have been disclosed to Megrahi's defence team, and that the failure to do so made Megrahi's conviction unsafe. The papers allege that Gauci was paid $2m (£1.2m) after Megrahi's conviction, and his brother Paul $1m.

In one of the memos released by Megrahi, police officers discussed the issue of payments that they said were made under the US "Awards of Justice" scheme. The memo warns of that Gauci "could be portrayed [by the media] as having given flawed evidence for financial reward," if the commission's concerns were disclosed.

In a statement Megrahi continued to protest his innocence. He said: "In releasing this information I have no desire to add to the upset of many people I know are profoundly affected by what happened in Lockerbie. My intention is only for the truth to be made known."

The new documents, published on a website set up for the purpose, constitute the convicted bomber's attempt to prove his innocence after his controversial release from Greenock prison on compassionate grounds in August. Megrahi is in the terminal stages of prostate cancer, and Scottish ministers believe he has less than three months to live.

Last month Megrahi released 298 pages of legal papers, which appeared to suggest the commission regarded Gauci's evidence as "unreasonable" .

The crucial mistake, the SCCRC said, was believing prosecution claims that Megrahi had bought clothes at Gauci's shop on 7 December 1988, allegedly later found in the suitcase used for the bomb. This evidence was "unreasonable", the SCCRC said, and was alone grounds for belief that Megrahi was wrongly convicted.

It was the commission that referred Megrahi's case back to the courts for its second appeal.

The new dossier presents what is said to be fresh and undisclosed evidence, suggesting that the clothes found in the suitcase were not purchased on 7 December 1988 as was was argued during the trial.

Gauci told the court that Megrahi bought the clothes before the Christmas lights were illuminated. Evidence from the diary of Michael Refalo, then Malta's tourism minister, stated that he switched on the Christmas lights on December 6. That evidence was not available at the time of the trial.

The new 180 page dossier also claims there was potentially another independent witness who saw other Libyans, not Megrahi, purchasing the clothes.

The witness said he overheard Gauci referring to the men as "Libyan pigs" which Megrahi's lawyers claimed showed he was "hostile" to Libya.

A spokesman for the Scottish government said the justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, made his decision to free Megrahi "based on the due process of Scots Law" and he "supports the conviction".

He added: "The Scottish government has already released as much relevant information as possible, and have met with the SCCRC to look at what documentation relating to the appeal could be released by them."

It is, of course, now all about oil. Only a simpleton could believe
that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of responsibility for the
Lockerbie bombing, was not recently returned to his home in Libya
because it suited Britain. The political furore is very obviously
contrived, since both the British and American governments know
perfectly well how and for what reasons he came to be prosecuted. More
important than the present passing storm is whether any aspect of the
investigation that led to al-Megrahi’s original conviction was also
about oil, or dictated by other factors that should have no place in a
prosecution process.

The devastation caused by the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over
Lockerbie, at the cost of 270 lives, deserved an investigation of utter
integrity. Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights demands
no less. Where there has been a death any inquiry must be independent,
effective and subject to public scrutiny, to provide the basis for an
attribution of responsibility and to initiate criminal proceedings where
appropriate. But, in the absence of this, a number of the bereaved
Lockerbie families have of necessity themselves become investigators,
asking probing questions for two decades without receiving answers; they
have learned sufficient forensic science to make sense of what was
being presented at al-Megrahi’s trial and make up their own minds
whether the prosecution of two Libyans at Camp Zeist near Utrecht was in
fact a three-card trick put together for political ends.

Perhaps
the result could have been different if there had been an entirely
Scottish police investigation, with unrestricted access to all available
information, without interference or manipulation from outside.
Instead, from the beginning, the investigation and what were to become
the most important aspects of the prosecution case against al-Megrahi
were hijacked. Within hours, the countryside around Lockerbie was
occupied: local people helping with the search under the supervision of
Dumfries and Galloway police realised to their astonishment that the
terrain was dotted with unidentified Americans not under the command of
the local police.

Each aspect of every criminal investigation in
Britain has to meet certain essential standards; where they are not met,
these parts of the investigation should not in principle become the
basis of a prosecution. There must be precise notes made of each
physical exhibit found and by whom; its movements must be tracked; each
time an exhibit is inspected, a record must be kept. The rationale is
obvious: without a precise record, interference, contamination or simple
mistakes could jeopardise a prosecutor’s reliance on evidence that
should be tangible and therefore potentially more convincing. For that
reason, a crime scene must be sealed off until searches are complete.

Those
engineering the destruction of a transatlantic airliner in mid-flight
might have believed that it would be likely to happen over the sea.
Instead, Pan Am 103 was destroyed over the Scottish town of Lockerbie
and its fall-out was scattered over an area too huge to cordon off. The
first and most desperate searches were for the passengers: could any
have survived? Volunteers included a police surgeon from Yorkshire who
had driven to the site as soon as he heard the news; together with the
local police, he and others searched non-stop for 24 hours. They found
bodies, none showing any sign of life; the doctor labelled each of the
bodies he found, more than 50 of them, noting the place of discovery.
Once it was clear there were no survivors, a search for evidence of the
cause of the explosion would begin.

Extraordinarily, however,
distinct from the Dumfries and Galloway police, scores of men, some
wearing no insignia, some the insignia of the FBI and Pan Am (it was
noted at the time that many of these men were clearly not Pan Am staff),
invaded the area. Lockerbie residents reported seeing unmarked
helicopters hovering overhead, carrying men with rifles whose telescopic
sights were pointing directly at them. And when, much later, items of
baggage came to be married up with the passengers they had accompanied,
there were disturbing signs of interference. The suitcase belonging to
Major McKee (a CIA operative flying back to the US to report on his
concern that the couriering of drugs was being officially condoned as a
way to entrap users and dealers in the US) was found to have had a hole
cut in its side after the explosion, while the clothes in the suitcase
were shown on subsequent analysis to bear no trace of explosives. A
second suitcase, opened by a Scottish farmer, contained packets of white
powder which a local police officer told him was undoubtedly heroin; no
heroin was ever recorded as having been discovered. All but two of the
labels that Dr Fieldhouse attached to the bodies he found were removed
and have never been found.

Although the crime was the most hideous
Scotland had ever known, the integrity of the crime scene was violated;
in part because outsiders were conducting a desperate search for
wreckage that it was important for them to find and spirit away. As many
police investigations over the years have demonstrated, such
distracting irregularities can simply be red herrings, and these
intrusions may have no bearing on the question of who blew up Pan Am
103. Was it individuals? Was it a country? And if so which one? From the
very beginning, in fact, it seemed that the case could and would be
easily solved. Considerable (and uncomplicated) evidence immediately to
hand suggested who might be responsible; it was as if giant arrows were
pointing towards the solution.

In the weeks before the bombing in
December 1988 there had been a number of very specific warnings that a
bomb would be placed on a Pan Am aircraft. Among them was a photograph
of a bomb in a Toshiba cassette radio wired to a barometric timer
switch; a number of such bombs had been found earlier in 1988 in the
possession of members of a small group with a history of successfully
carrying out bombings, primarily of American targets. One group member
told police that five bombs had been made; at least one was missing at
the time of the Lockerbie disaster and never recovered. The warnings
were sufficiently exact that the staff of the American Embassy in
Moscow, who usually travelled by Pan Am when they returned to the US for
Christmas, used a different airline. Flora Swire, who was travelling to
New York to spend Christmas with her boyfriend, found it surprisingly
easy to buy a ticket.

All the Toshiba cassette bombs that had been
seized were found, when tested, to run for 30 minutes after they were
set. The advantage of barometric timers is that they aren’t activated
until the plane is airborne – the bomb won’t go off on the ground if the
plane is delayed. Some seven or eight minutes would elapse before the
air pressure dropped enough as the plane gained height to activate a
barometric timer set to go off 30 minutes later, i.e. 37 or 38 minutes
after the flight took off. It was precisely 38 minutes after Pan Am
Flight 103 took off from Heathrow on 21 December 1988 that it exploded
over Lockerbie; when the remnants of the destroyed plane and its
contents were put together piece by piece by the Dumfries and Galloway
police, fragments of a Toshiba cassette radio were found.

Forensic
scientists believed that the radio had been in a suitcase in which
there were clothes whose label was traced to a shop in Malta. A search
of the house of a man affiliated to the group that manufactured the
Toshiba bombs produced clothes bought in Malta; it was established too
that he had travelled to Malta before the bombing. And the owner of the
Maltese shop from which the clothes were thought to have been purchased
identified to his brother, without prompting, a newspaper photograph of
that man as the person who had bought the clothes found in the suitcase
with the bomb inside.

But the man who bought the clothes was not
al-Megrahi, nor was he Libyan. The group making Toshiba radio cassette
bombs had no connection at all with Libya. Neither the man nor the group
was ever prosecuted for involvement in the Lockerbie bombing. The fact
that the explosion took place exactly when one would have expected it to
if a Toshiba cassette bomb had been used was ignored: the bomb had not,
the prosecution contended at al-Megrahi’s trial, been triggered by a
barometric switch in this way. The Lockerbie device, it claimed, was
different from the devices made by the group. The difference was that it
was a Toshiba cassette radio with one speaker rather than two. From a
logically compelling case that seemed to point clearly in one direction
the prosecution switched tack, but not at the beginning: not, in fact,
until two years after the bombing, when the politics of the Middle East
shifted and new allies had to be found quickly if the flow of cheap oil
were to continue.

It is not difficult to achieve a conviction of
the innocent. Over many decades several common factors have been
identified, and the majority of them are present, centre stage, in this
case: achieving the co-operation of witnesses by means of a combination
of inducements and fear of the alternative (the tried and tested method
of obtaining evidence for the prosecution on which many US cases rely);
the provision of factual information by scientists where there is no
proper basis for it (a recurrent theme in UK convictions as well as in
the US); reliance on ‘identification’ evidence which is no such thing.
Add to that the political will to achieve a prosecution, and the rest is
easy. Fabrication demands outright dishonesty, but it isn’t always
necessary, or necessary in every aspect of an investigation: the
momentum of suspicion, and a blinkered determination to focus on a
particular thesis and ignore evidence pointing to the contrary, is a
certain route to achieving the desired end. Al-Megrahi is reported as
saying that he has evidence, which will be revealed on his death, that
will prove his innocence. But it is clear even from the evidence that
can be looked at today that his conviction was extremely disturbing.

For
the first two years there was no mention at all of Libya. The
investigation originally seemed to have clear evidence of a motive (tit
for tat retaliation); evidence of the existence of a bomb intended to
destroy airliners in mid-flight contained in the same brand of cassette
radio discovered on the plane; and evidence implicating a Palestinian
splinter group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine –
General Command, which was prepared at the time to hire itself out to
regimes that were known to be state sponsors of terrorism; Syria was one
(somewhat earlier, Libya had been another), so was Iran.

Behind
every crime there is of course a motive. For the initial prime suspect,
Iran, the motive was brutally clear. In July 1988 a US battleship, the Vincennes,
shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in the Persian Gulf, with 290 passengers,
many of them pilgrims en route to Mecca. There were no survivors. By
chance a television crew was on the Vincennes when the attack
took place and images of triumph at the carnage were immediately beamed
around the world. When it became clear, as it did straight away, that
the attack was an appalling error, the US compounded its mistake:
President Reagan claimed self-defence and the ship’s commander and crew
were awarded high military honours.

Two days after the downing of
the Iranian airbus, Tehran Radio condemned the attack as an act of naked
aggression and announced it would be avenged ‘in blood-splattered
skies’. At the same time, US Air Force Command issued a warning to its
civilian contractors: ‘We believe Iran will strike back in a tit for tat
fashion – mass casualties.’ Warnings became more specific: ‘We believe
Europe is the likely target for a retaliatory attack . . . due to the
large concentration of Americans and the established terrorist
infrastructures in place throughout Europe.’ Within days, US
intelligence was convinced that Iran meant business; and the CIA in due
course acknowledged that it had intelligence that Ahmad Jibril, the
leader of the PFLP-GC, had met government officials in Iran and offered
his services.

Such a partnership would indeed have been ominous,
since the activities of the PFLP-GC had since 1970 included planting
bombs on planes – bombs built into transistor radios and detonated by a
barometric pressure switch. It was in this context that the flood of
warnings immediately preceding the disaster had obvious significance for
the subsequent investigation. One of them read: ‘team of Palestinians
not associated with PLO intends to attack US targets in Europe. Time
frame is present. Targets specified are Pan Am Airlines and US military
bases.’ Five weeks before this warning, a PFLP-GC cell had been arrested
in Germany. The PFLP-GC was precisely a ‘team of Palestinians not
associated with the PLO’. Jibril’s right-hand man, Haffez Dalkamoni, was
arrested in Frankfurt with a known bomb-maker, Marwen Khreesat, as they
visited electrical shops in the city. In the boot of Dalkamoni’s car
was a Toshiba cassette recorder with Semtex moulded inside it, a simple
time delay switch and a barometric switch. Later US intelligence
officials confirmed that members of the group had been monitoring Pan
Am’s facilities at Frankfurt airport. Dalkamoni admitted he had
supervised Khreesat when he built bombs into a Toshiba radio cassette
player, two radio tuners and a TV monitor. He said that a second Toshiba
containing similar pressure switches had been built. Although Dalkamoni
was prosecuted in Germany, Khreesat was inexplicably released; it only
later became clear that he had been acting throughout as an undercover
agent for Jordanian intelligence, which is extraordinarily close to the
CIA (the CIA played a central role in its creation). On Dalkamoni’s
account, other bombs made by Khreesat were at large somewhere, including
the one built into a second Toshiba player.

On 9 November 1988
Interpol circulated warnings about the PFLP-GC bombs. Heathrow Airport
issued its own warning to security staff, stating that it was
‘imperative that when screening or searching radios, radio cassette
players and other electrical equipment, staff are to be extra vigilant’.
Over the next three weeks the airport received more information,
including photographs of the Toshiba bomb from the German authorities.
(A document giving information and advice was drawn up by the UK’s
principal aviation security adviser on 19 December, but there were
problems obtaining colour photographs and delays in the Christmas post
and most airlines did not receive it until the new year, weeks after the
disaster.)

In March 1989, less than three months after the
downing of Flight 103, the then secretary of state for transport, Paul
Channon, had lunch with some journalists. He talked, indiscreetly, of
the brilliant detective work undertaken by the smallest police force in
the country. Arrests, he told the journalists, were imminent. Although
such conversations are customarily regarded as not for attribution, the
next morning’s newspapers revealed that a cabinet minister had stated
that those responsible for the Lockerbie bombing had been identified and
would soon be arrested.

At precisely the same time, however, the US president, George Bush Senior, was reported by the Washington Post
as having spoken to Margaret Thatcher about Lockerbie, advising her to
keep Lockerbie ‘low-key’, to avoid prejudicing negotiations with Syrian
and Iranian-backed groups holding Western hostages in Lebanon. There
were no arrests; Channon left the cabinet; and political interest in the
case and desire to identify who was responsible for the disaster
disappeared. The victims’ families demanded evidence that a proper
inquiry was being conducted and in September 1989 Channon’s successor,
Cecil Parkinson, met the newly formed UK Families Flight 103. He
promised them a full judicial inquiry. Thatcher countermanded this
promise, and he returned to the relatives with an admission of total
failure. ‘Low-key’ meant no judicial inquiry, no prosecution, and
instead a Fatal Accident Inquiry with no powers to subpoena which
declined to investigate how the bomb got on the plane for fear of
interfering with police inquiries.

As political players grow old,
they reminisce and sometimes they forget what they are meant to have
said or not said. Five years later Parkinson took part in a television
programme about another horrific disaster, the sinking of the Marchioness,
in which he confirmed that it was Thatcher who had blocked a judicial
inquiry. He remembered discussing with the Lockerbie relatives whether,
‘because the security services were involved’, a High Court judge could
look into the security aspects and report privately to him: ‘Because
when you get into the Lockerbie business – how did we find out certain
information, how did we know this, how did we know that? – you would
have had to recall not only our own intelligence sources but information
we were receiving from overseas. Therefore that had to be a closed
area.’ This suggested the real block.

Nevertheless, investigators
had clearly remained confident that despite government diffidence a
prosecution would soon be brought. Late in 1989 an imminent arrest once
again seemed tantalisingly on the cards. The Sunday Times
(known to enjoy detailed briefings from the police and security
services) reported that the ‘net was closing’ on the Lockerbie suspects
and stated categorically that the bombing had been carried out by the
German PFLP-GC cell led by Dalkamoni under orders from Ahmad Jibril and
with a bomb made by Khreesat. What was new was the suggestion that the
bomb had first been put on a plane not in Frankfurt but in Malta.
Clothes made in Malta, the report added, had been found in the suitcase
in which police believed the bomb had been planted. A member of
Dalkamoni’s cell, Abu Talb, who was then awaiting trial for separate
offences in Sweden, had, it revealed, visited Malta. He was the man
identified by the shop owner: the man who had clothes bought in Malta in
his possession. The Sunday Times articles went on to predict that Abu Talb would be extradited at any moment to stand trial for the bombing.

The
suggestion that the bomb was placed on a plane from Malta was made in
an attempt to link the discovery of the Maltese clothes with the already
existing evidence of the German group. As no passengers transferred
from Air Malta to Pan Am 103A in Frankfurt, the feeder flight for Pan Am
103, it would have had to be an unaccompanied bag from Malta that
carried the bomb. Two documents were said to have been discovered: a
list of the stages followed by Frankfurt airport’s automated baggage
system which related to Pan Am 103, and a handwritten worksheet from one
of the several stations from which baggage came into the system. As
this was official information, it must have been given lock, stock and
barrel by investigators to the journalist in question.

A
fundamental objection to the last part of the new thesis was blindingly
clear: if the intended target was an American aircraft, why risk a
premature explosion triggered by the barometric switch by putting the
suitcase on an Air Malta flight? The scientific underpinning necessary
to support a counter-proposition was established during 1989 and 1990
and rested on two ‘discoveries’: a fragment of an entirely different
type of timer in the remnant of a shirt collar and the matching of that
fragment with the manufacturer’s prototype. This timer, it was argued,
could, once set, keep a barometric switch from detonating for days. It
was in the development of this proposition that every safeguard
fundamental to a criminal investigation came to be jettisoned.

That
Iran and the PFLP-GC were responsible had fitted comfortably with UK
and US foreign policy in the Middle East. Both countries had severed
relations with Syria on the grounds of its persistent support for
international terrorism; both had supported Iraq in the Iran/Iraq war,
which ended in the summer of 1988. The obvious truth as it appeared at
the time was that the Jibril group, sponsored in this instance by Iran,
was a logical as well as politically acceptable fit.

Then, in
August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, thereby putting at risk
almost 10 per cent of US oil supplies, and the stability of the Saudi
and Gulf sheikhdoms on which the West depended to preserve the status
quo in the region. A sudden shift of alliances was necessary: if Iraq
had to be confronted, then Iran had to be treated differently and the
Syrian regime needed to be brought on board. At the beginning of 1991
Syrians joined Western troops in the attack on Saddam Hussein’s invading
army.

The centre of the Lockerbie investigation had by this time
ceased to be Scotland: the CIA was in charge. Vincent Cannistraro had
made his mark under Ronald Reagan, with a clandestine programme to
destabilise the Libyan regime. He boasted that he ‘developed the policy
towards Libya’ which culminated in the bombing of Gaddafi’s house in
Tripoli in 1986 on the basis of intercept evidence later acknowledged to
be false. Now brought out of retirement, Cannistraro shifted the
investigation’s approach. The suspect country was no longer Iran but
Libya, and in November 1991, the UK and the US made a joint announcement
that two Libyan Airlines officials, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and Al
Amin Khalifa Fhimah, had planted the bomb in Malta on behalf of Libyan
intelligence. Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, announced to the
House of Commons that Libyans alone were suspected and that other
countries were not implicated.

Years of protracted negotiations
were to take place before the Libyan government agreed to release the
two men to stand trial in a ‘neutral country’. It was not until May 2000
that the two Libyan Airlines officials who had run the airline’s office
in Malta finally went on trial – in a purpose-built court outside
Utrecht created from a mothballed air-force base – under Scots law,
albeit before three judges rather than a jury. What did Gaddafi expect
when he agreed to the extradition of the two men? That they would in due
course be exonerated because they were innocent but that he would
meanwhile reap the diplomatic benefit by having delivered them? The idea
of their individual responsibility was anyway peculiar: as agents of a
state where not a mouse squeaks without the say-so of Gaddafi,
al-Megrahi and Fhimah were either ordered to do what it was said they
did, in which case dealing with Gaddafi as a statesman then and now has
been beyond hypocrisy – or the thesis was wrong.

The key features
needed to prosecute al-Megrahi successfully were the scientific
identification of the circuit-board fragment, which would in turn
establish its origin, and the identification of the purchaser of the
clothes in Malta. The timers, the indictment stated, were made by a firm
in Switzerland; their circuit board matched the fragment retrieved from
Lockerbie, and they sold the timers exclusively to Libya. Everything,
essentially, hinged on those links.

Who found the fragment? And
who understood its relevance? Thomas Hayes of the Royal Armament
Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) claimed the find (with
his colleague Alan Feraday) and Thomas Thurman of the FBI claimed the
analytical victory. All were swiftly hailed (or hailed themselves) as
heroes. Thurman appeared on television on 15 November 1991, the day
after indictments were issued against the two Libyans, boasting that he
had identified the piece of circuit board as part of a timing device
that might have been sold to Libyan Airlines staff. ‘I made the
identification and I knew at that point what it meant. And because, if
you will, I am an investigator as well as a forensic examiner, I knew
where that would go. At that point we had no conclusive proof of the
type of timing mechanism that was used in the bombing of 103. When that
identification was made of the timer I knew that we had it.’ This was
the claim – the hard evidence – that linked Libyans to the crime. If the
claim was false the bereaved Lockerbie families have been deceived for
20 years.

On 13 September 1995 the FBI’s forensic department was
the subject of a programme broadcast in the US by ABC. At its centre was
a memorandum from the former head of explosive science at the FBI, Dr
Frederic Whitehurst. It was a devastating indictment of a former
colleague. The colleague was Thomas Thurman and the accusations related
to his investigation of a terrorist attack in which a judge was killed
by pipe bombs. Two years later, as a result of a review by the US
inspector general, Michael Bromwich, into a large number of criminal
investigations, Thomas Thurman was barred from FBI labs and from being
called as an expert witness. Bromwich had discovered that he had no
formal scientific qualifications and that, according to a former
colleague, he had been ‘circumventing procedures and protocols,
testifying to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications in . . .
therefore fabricating evidence’.

Thurman had made the Libyan
connection, and its plausibility relied on the accuracy of his statement
that the fragment of circuit board proved that it would have been
possible for the unaccompanied bag to fly from Malta without the
seemingly inevitable mid-air explosion. And thus it was that a witness
from Switzerland, Edwin Bollier, the manufacturer of the MEBO circuit
board, was called on to provide evidence that such boards had been sold
exclusively to Libya. Bollier was described by al-Megrahi’s barrister in
his closing speech as an ‘illegitimate arms dealer with morals to
match’. The evidence he was clearly intended to provide had begun to
unravel even before the trial began. Sales elsewhere in the world were
discovered, Thurman did not appear at the trial, and the judges
commented that Bollier’s evidence was ‘inconsistent’ and
‘self-contradictory’. Other witnesses, they found, had ‘openly lied to
the court’. Despite all this al-Megrahi was convicted.

Bollier had
been one of the most potentially dubious of many dubious witnesses for
the prosecution. But Dr Köchler, the UN’s observer throughout the trial,
recorded that Bollier had been ‘brusquely interrupted’ by the presiding
judge when he attempted to raise the issue of the possible manipulation
of the timer fragments. Could the MEBO board, or a part of one, have
been planted in such a way that it could be conveniently ‘discovered’?
After the trial, new evidence that would have been at the centre of
al-Megrahi’s now abandoned appeal made this suggestion more credible: a
Swiss electronics engineer called Ulrich Lumpert, formerly employed by
Bollier’s firm, stated in an affidavit to Köchler that in 1989 he stole a
‘non-operational’ timing board from MEBO and handed it to ‘a person
officially investigating in the Lockerbie case’. Bollier himself told
Köchler that he was offered $4 million if he would connect the timer to
Libya.

There were throughout two aspects of the investigation over
which the Scottish authorities exerted little authority: in the US, the
activities of the CIA and in particular of Thomas Thurman and the
forensic branch of the FBI; in England, the forensic investigations of
RARDE, carried out by Hayes and Feraday. Without Hayes’s findings, the
Lockerbie prosecution would have been impossible. His evidence was that
on 12 May 1989 he discovered and tweezed out from a remnant of cloth an
electronic fragment, part of a circuit board. The remnant of cloth, part
of a shirt collar, was then traced to a Maltese shop. A number of
aspects of the original circuit board find were puzzling. The remnant
was originally found in January 1989 by a DC Gilchrist and a DC McColm
in the outer reaches of the area over which the bomb-blast debris was
spread. It was labelled ‘cloth (charred)’ by him, but then overwritten
as ‘debris’ even though the fragment of circuit board had not yet been
‘found’ by Hayes. The fragment found by Hayes, and identified as a MEBO
circuit board by Thurman, meant that the thesis of an Air Malta
involvement could survive.

Even if one knew nothing of the
devastating findings of the public inquiry in the early 1990s into the
false science that convicted the Maguire Seven or of the succession of
thunderous judgments in the Court of Appeal in case after case in which
RARDE scientists had provided the basis for wrongful convictions,
Hayes’s key evidence in this case on the key fragment should be viewed
as disgraceful. There is a basic necessity for evidential preservation
in any criminal case: every inspection must be logged, chronology
recorded, detail noted. But at every point in relation to this vital
fragment that information was either missing or had been altered,
although Hayes had made meticulous notes in respect of every single one
of the hundreds of other exhibits he inspected in the Lockerbie
investigation.

No forensic scientist knows when he conducts his
examinations whether or when there will be a prosecution that will
depend on them; this makes it all the more important that his notes are
exact. Hayes confirmed that it was his practice to draw pieces of
circuit board where he found them – for instance in the vicinity of
blast-damaged material – but he made no such drawings of this item, nor
had he given it an exhibit reference number as he had every other
exhibit being designated at the time, nor did he carry out a standard
test for traces of explosive. Almost a month after his inspection of the
timer fragment, Hayes was identifying and drawing exhibits which were
given reference numbers smaller than the number of the vital exhibit. He
recorded his finding on page 51 of his notes, but the pages originally
numbered 51-55 had been renumbered 52-56 at some point. Hayes stated
that he had ‘no idea’ when the change in pagination was carried out. The
inference put to Hayes was that the original page 51 and the following
pages had been renumbered, an original page removed and space made to
insert what was now page 51 of his notes.

Curiously, a memorandum
from Hayes’s colleague Feraday, written on 15 September 1989, to a
detective inspector working on the case, referred to a fragment of green
circuit board: ‘Willy, enclosed are some Polaroid photographs of the
green circuit board. Sorry about the quality, it is the best I can do in
such a short time.’ No one was able to explain why there should have
been any shortage of time to make available in September 1989
photographs of an item that had been found on 12 May. Feraday’s note
continued: ‘I feel that this fragment could be potentially most
important so any light your lads or lasses can shed upon the problem of
identifying it will be most welcome.’ Again no one was able to explain
what light the lads and lasses could shed on something it was most
curious they had not seen before now, given that Hayes had recovered it
in May. Clearly it could not have been seen by the police before the
cloth was passed to Hayes at RARDE and the fragment extracted by him. If
Hayes had photographed the exhibit, as was his normal practice, then
Feraday would not have needed to rely on Polaroids of dubious quality.
The issue of his notes’ pagination was described by Hayes as ‘an
unfathomable mystery’. In view of the importance of exhibit PT/35(b),
how could the court have been satisfied by this evidence? The new
evidence of the former MEBO employee who stole a circuit board would of
course have been ripe for analysis by the Court of Appeal, which has now
been discharged from considering new evidence in al-Megrahi’s lately
abandoned appeal.

A secondary important proposition for the Crown
to consider was that the suitcase was on the second layer of a luggage
container on the aircraft – which meant that it must have come from
Frankfurt. Examining the largest surviving fragment of the outside case
of the Toshiba device on 25 January 1989, Hayes had considered its state
consistent with its having been at the base of the container. This
would have contradicted the Crown’s position that the device was in a
suitcase that had arrived last, as unaccompanied baggage from Malta via
Frankfurt, and so was nearer the top. By the time he gave evidence at
the trial, Hayes had revised his assessment of its position.

(Since
the trial, evidence new to the defence but known from the start to the
police has surfaced of a break-in at Heathrow in the hours before the
disaster. The Fatal Accident Inquiry, which didn’t have this knowledge,
had made a finding in 1991 that Pan Am 103 was ‘under constant guard at
Heathrow’. Iran Air’s hangar at Heathrow was next to Pan Am’s.)

This
isn’t the first time we have heard of Hayes and Feraday. Among the many
wrongful convictions in the 1970s for which RARDE scientists were
responsible, Hayes played his part in the most notorious of all,
endorsing the finding of an explosive trace that was never there, and
speculating that a piece of chalk mentioned to the police by Vincent
Maguire, aged 16, and a candle by Patrick Maguire, aged 13, ‘fitted the
description better’ of a stick of gelignite wrapped in white paper. Both
were convicted and imprisoned on this evidence, together with their
parents and their uncle Giuseppe Conlon, who was to die in prison. All
were later found to be innocent.

Although Feraday was often
addressed by the prosecution as ‘Dr’ or ‘Professor’ when he gave
evidence, he had no relevant academic qualifications, only a higher
national certificate in physics and electronics some 30 years old. Dr
Michael Scott, whose evidence has been preferred in appeals to that of
Feraday, commented that ‘the British government employed hundreds of
people who were extraordinarily well qualified in the areas of radio
communication and electronics. Alan Feraday is not qualified yet they
use him. I have to ask the question why.’ Feraday, like his US
counterpart Thurman, has now been banned from future appearances as an
expert witness, but he had already provided the key evidence in a
roll-call of convictions of the innocent. A note of a pre-trial
conference with counsel prosecuting Danny McNamee (who was wrongly
convicted of involvement in a bombing in Hyde Park) provides a typical
instance: ‘F [Feraday] prepared to say it [a circuit board] purely for
bombing purposes, no innocent purpose.’ The implication here was that
anyone who had involvement with this circuit board would have knowingly
been involved in bomb construction. That, in common with many other
assertions made by Feraday, was entirely false, but it resulted in
McNamee’s imprisonment for 11 years.

To discover that al-Megrahi’s
conviction was in large part based on the evidence of scientists whose
value as professional witnesses had been permanently and publicly
demolished ten years before his trial is astounding. The discovery
nearly two decades ago of a large number of wrongful convictions enabled
by scientific evidence rightly led to demands that the community of
forensic scientists change its ways. Similarly, a series of catastrophic
misidentifications required the introduction of sound new practices for
evidence based on that most fragile of human attributes, visual memory.
Witnesses must not be prompted; a witness’s memory, as far as possible,
must be as safely protected from contamination as a crime scene. The
first description is vital. If a witness makes a positive identification
of one individual, no subsequent identification of a second is
permissible. Equivocation and uncertainty are not enough. Even if the
science that convicted al-Megrahi had not offended against every minimum
standard, then the second pillar of the prosecution case, his
identification by Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper, would remain
spectacular in its noncompliance with any safeguard. He described
al-Megrahi as ‘6’0’’’ (he was 5’8’’), ‘50 years old’ (he was 37), and
‘hefty’; said that he ‘had been to the shop before and after’, ‘had been
there only once’; that he ‘saw him in a bar months later’; that he
‘will sign statement even though I don’t speak English’; that al-Megrahi
‘was similar but not identical’, ‘perhaps like him but not fully like
him’, and, fatally for any identification of al-Megrahi in the first
place, that he was ‘like the man in the Sunday Times’ (in other
words, like Abu Talb, whose picture Gauci had initially identified).
But Gauci’s evidence was needed and, reports suggest, handsomely
rewarded. He apparently now lives in Australia, supported by millions of
US dollars.

That a court of three experienced judges convicted on
such evidence and that an appeal court upheld the conviction is
profoundly shocking. Köchler, the UN observer, reported finding the
guilty verdict ‘incomprehensible’ in view of the court’s admission that
Gauci’s identification was ‘not absolute’. We had come to believe that
such an outcome, resting on invalid identification, was no longer
possible. ‘The guilty verdict’, Köchler wrote, was ‘arbitrary, even
irrational’ with an ‘air of international power politics’ present ‘in
the whole verdict’, which was ‘based on a series of highly problematic
inferences’. He remarked on the withholding of ‘substantial information’
(‘more or less openly exercised influence on the part of actors outside
the judicial framework’) and on the very visible interference with the
work of the Scottish prosecutors by US lawyers present in the well of
the court. But most seriously, he set out his ‘suspicion that political
considerations may have been overriding a strictly judicial evaluation
of the case’. All of this harks back to the bad old days when a blind
eye was turned to the way convictions were obtained.

Al-Megrahi’s
trial constituted a unique legal construct, engineered to achieve a
political rapprochement, but its content was so manipulated that in
reality there was only ever an illusion of a trial. Dr Köchler recorded
at its conclusion that it was ‘not fair’ and that it was not ‘conducted
in an objective manner’, so that there were ‘many more questions and
doubts at the end than the beginning’. Since then, these doubts have not
disappeared: on the contrary, the questions are graver, the doubts have
grown and so has the strength of the evidence on which they are based.
Köchler’s observations continue to have compelling relevance; he found
the respect of the court, the defence lawyers included, for the ‘shrouds
of secrecy’ and ‘national security considerations’ to be ‘totally
incomprehensible to any rational observer’. ‘Proper judicial procedure,’
he continued, ‘is simply impossible if political interests and
intelligence services – from whichever side – succeed in interfering in
the actual conduct of a court.’

The term miscarriage of justice
carries with it the inference of accident, but also of death. There is a
pressing need to investigate in detail how it has come about that there
has been a form of death in this case – the death of justice – and who
should be found responsible.

As a partner of Gareth Peirce until my retirement may I add a sequel to her penetrating analysis of the al-Megrahi case (LRB, 24 September).
First, to point out that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission
(SCCRC) after an investigation lasting over three years referred his
conviction to the Scottish court of appeal in June 2007; its statement
of referral extended to more than 800 pages with 13 volumes of
appendices. It is that appeal which, as Gareth Peirce says, al-Megrahi
abandoned before his release and repatriation to Libya, thus denying the
court the opportunity to consider the case, even though the SCCRC
stated in its press release: ‘based upon our lengthy investigations, the
new evidence we have found and other evidence which was not before the
trial court ... the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of
justice.’ Why did al-Megrahi withdraw his appeal? Was it because he was
put under pressure to secure his release on compassionate grounds? Or
was it voluntarily done because he lacked confidence in the impartiality
of the court? Whatever the truth may be, the onus now rests on the
Scottish government to establish a public judicial inquiry, so that the
case so painstakingly prepared by the SCCRC does not go by default.

Second,
to add to the suspicions Peirce’s article exposes, it needs to be said
that the Scottish justice secretary Kenny MacAskill’s decision has
unleashed a hysterical torrent of vilification, not least in the US
where many of the relatives of the Lockerbie victims are convinced of
al-Megrahi’s guilt. We have witnessed a campaign of denigration on which
even Obama, Hillary Clinton and the late Edward Kennedy have bestowed
their benediction. On this side of the Atlantic too the irrational
commentators abound. The overwhelming weight of media comment has been
hostile to al-Megrahi. On 3 September the Guardian carried a
long article by Malcolm Rifkind, the former foreign secretary and a
prominent Scottish lawyer, headed ‘Megrahi’s return has been a sorry,
cocked-up conspiracy’: it failed even to mention the SCCRC reference.
Even pillars of the human rights establishment, such as Geoffrey
Robertson, have shouted themselves hoarse: ‘We should be ashamed that
this has happened’ (Guardian, 22 August) and ‘Megrahi should
never have been freed: the result is a triumph for state terrorism and a
worldwide boost for the death penalty’ (Independent, 2 September).

Yet,
when al-Megrahi releases part of the SCCRC case on the internet, his
declared aim being to clear his name and ostensibly to prove his
innocence, pat comes the Scottish lord advocate (Scotland’s chief
prosecutor) joining relatives of the victims convinced of his guilt to
denounce him for his ‘media campaign’. Meanwhile pleas from those who,
like Dr Jim Swire, believe justice has not been done and who, for the
sake of the memory of the victims as much as al-Megrahi, wish there to
be a genuine and far-reaching inquiry, fall on deaf ears.

Fresh scientific evidence unearthed by a Scottish legal review
undermines the case against the man convicted of being responsible for
the Lockerbie aircraft bombing, an investigation for Al Jazeera has
found.

The Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission (SCCRC) report details
evidence that would probably have resulted in the verdict against Abdel
Baset al-Meghrahi, a Libyan man convicted of carrying out the bombing of
Pan-Am flight 103 in 1988, being overturned.

'Lockerbie: Case Closed', an hour-long documentary to be aired on Al
Jazeera on Monday, examines the evidence uncovered by the SCCRC as well
as revealing fresh scientific evidence which is unknown to the
commission but which comprehensively undermines a crucial part of the
case against the man known as the Lockerbie bomber.

Among the evidence examined by the SCCRC was the testimony of Tony
Gauci, a shop owner from Malta, and the most important prosecution
witness in the case.

Gauci identified Megrahi as a man who had bought clothing and an
umbrella from him on December 7, 1988 - remnants of which were later
recovered from among debris recovered from the disaster scene.

The SCCRC found a number of reasons to seriously question this
identification and Gauci’s account of events on that date, which was
also the only day on which Megrahi could have been present in Malta to
make such purchases

The report also raises concerns about the legitimacy of the formal
identification process, in which Gauci picked Megrahi out from a
line-up. The commission found that Gauci had seen Megrahi’s photo in a
magazine article identifying him as a possible suspect many weeks before
the parade took place

The SCCRC also found that Scottish police knew that Gauci was
interested in financial rewards, despite maintaining that the shopkeeper
had shown no such interest

Gauci reportedly picked up a $2 million US government reward for his
role in the case. Under Scottish law, witnesses cannot be paid for their
testimony.

Most significantly, the documentary will reveal the dramatic results
of new scientific tests that destroy the most crucial piece of forensic
evidence linking the bombing to Libya.

The new revelations were put to the terminally sick Megrahi in Libya,
and his comments on the case will be heard for the first time in these
films.

Of Gauci, he maintains that he never visited his shop.

"If I
have a chance to see him [Gauci] I am forgiving him. I would tell him
that I have never in my entire life been in his shop. I have never
bought any clothing from him. And I tell him that he dealt with me very
wrongly. This man - I have never seen him in my entire life except when
he came to the court. I find him a very simple man," Meghrahi told Al
Jazeera.

John Ashton, who has been investigating the case for
nearly 20 years, including time spent as part of Megrahi’s defence team,
said: "The Lockerbie disaster was Europe’s worst terrorist attack. More
Americans died in that attack than in any other terrorist event before
9/11. It's also Britain’s worst miscarriage of justice, the wrong man
was convicted and the real killers are still out there."

Lockerbie: Case Closed will be broadcast on Monday, February 27, 2012, at 20:00 GMT on Al Jazeera English.